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Right-winger men and men politicians really don't care that much about abortion....

It's clear you have some strong opinions about abortion and "right winger men" - but that's all they are - your opinions. And in blasting that group as you did in such a broad-brushed and general manner, it's likely a pellet or two hit its target somewhere in the group, but you've no warrant for grouping us all together in the first place, let alone making the assertions you've made in your OP, none at all.

Nor does feedback from a single anti-abortion extremist disprove my analysis. I have watched male Repub politicians for years try to out-extreme one another in claiming support for passing increasingly harsh anti-abortion laws, and I don’t believe even for a single moment that it is not mostly just promoting a wedge issue for political purposes rather than a true ethical/moral outrage towards the subject for a very large percentage of them.
 
Nor does feedback from a single anti-abortion extremist disprove my analysis. I have watched male Repub politicians for years try to out-extreme one another in claiming support for passing increasingly harsh anti-abortion laws, and I don’t believe even for a single moment that it is not mostly just promoting a wedge issue for political purposes rather than a true ethical/moral outrage towards the subject for a very large percentage of them.
You want to believe politicians, that's on you.
 
Here is a start:
“Meet Scott Lloyd, the head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement; in theory he’s responsible for supporting refugees build a better life in America by providing them with financial and medical assistance. Under previous administrations, this included abortion services. But we live in a God-fearing America now, and Lloyd has made it his mission to ensure refugee women, including unaccompanied minors, don’t get abortions. He even blocked a 17-year-old-girl who had been raped from having an abortion. “The child – the one who is destroyed – is not an aggressor,” he argued in a report. No Scott, the child isn’t an aggressor; you are.

As Mother Jones reported this week, despite his patronizing proselytizing, Lloyd doesn’t always practice what he preaches. As a young man he drove an ex-girlfriend to get an abortion and paid for half of it.

Lloyd joins an illustrious list of Republicans whose stance on abortion is basically: “It’s OK for me; evil for thee.” Earlier this year, for example, it emerged that Elliot Broidy, the former RNC deputy finance chairman paid $1.6m to a Playboy Playmate he had an affair with, after she aborted his child.

Then there is Tim Murphy, the pro-life Pennsylvania Republican who resigned last year after it was revealed he had urged his mistress to consider an abortion. And let’s not forget the charming Scott DesJarlais. According to testimony during his divorce trial, the Tennessee congressman supported his ex-wife's decision to get two abortions before their marriage. The former doctor also allegedly pressured a 24-year-old patient he was having an affair with to get an abortion. Even after all that information came out DesJarlais still had the gall to vote for anti-abortion bills and boast of having a “100% pro-life voting record."

 
Actually it is opinion. The opinion of a previous Supreme Court, but always highly controversial.

The Constitution does not specifically mention abortion. The SCOTUS opinion that made it a constitutional right was based on an *implied* right to medical privacy.

That remains controversial and there is some chance it could be overturned.

I'm not advocating a position, btw, just correcting an error. SCOTUS decisions are not easily changed but they're not necessarily eternal either.
Actually, There were several right to privacy precedents that Roe was based on.

It will interesting to see how the Supreme Court could overturn Roe without also for example overturning parental rights.

The following cases could become dismantled if Roe v Wade were overturned.



Weems v. United States (1910)
In a case from the Philippines, the Supreme Court finds that the definition of "cruel and unusual punishment" is not limited to what the authors of the Constitution understood under that concept.

Meyer v. Nebraska (1923)
A case ruling that parents may decide for themselves if and when their children may learn a foreign language, based upon a fundamental liberty interest individuals have in the family unit.

Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925)
A case deciding that parents may not be forced to send their children to public rather than private schools, based on the idea that, once again, parents have a fundamental liberty in deciding what happens to their children.


Olmstead v. United States (1928)
The court decides that wire tapping is legal, no matter what the reason or motivation, because it is not expressly prohibited in the Constitution. Justice Brandeis' dissent, however, lays the groundwork for future understandings of privacy.

Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942)
An Oklahoma law providing for the sterilization of people found to be "habitual criminals" is struck down, based on idea that all people have a fundamental right to make their own choices about marriage and procreation.

Tileston v. Ullman (1943) & Poe v. Ullman (1961)
The Court refuses to hear a case on Connecticut laws prohibiting the sale of contraceptives because no one can demonstrate they have been harmed. Harlan's dissent in Poe, however, explains why the case should be reviewed and why fundamental privacy interests are at stake.

Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)
Connecticut's laws against distribution of contraceptives and contraceptive information to married couples are struck down, with the Court relying on earlier precedent involving the rights of people to make decisions about their families and procreation as a legitimate sphere of privacy.

Loving v. Virginia (1967)
Virginia law against interracial marriages is struck down, with the Court once again declaring that marriage is a "fundamental civil right" and that decisions in this arena are not those with which the State can interefere unless they have good cause.

Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972)
The right of people to have and know about contraceptives is expanded to unmarried couples, because the right of people to make such decisions exists due not simply to the nature of the marriage relationship. Instead, it is also due to the fact that it is individuals making these decisions, and as such the government has no business making it for them, regardless of their marital status.

Roe v. Wade (1973)
The landmark decision which established that women have a basic right to have an abortion, this was based in many ways upon the earlier decisions above. Through the above cases, the Supreme Court developed the idea that the Constitution protects a person's to privacy, particularly when it comes to matters involving children and procreation.
 
I'd like to point out, without taking a specific position on abortion at this time, that men's and women's views on abortion are roughly similar in distribution. That is, the percentage of men and women with pro or anti views are very similar.

In other words, characterizing this chiefly as "men trying to control women" is inaccurate; there are about as many women who are pro-life in some sense, as men.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/245618/abortion-trends-gender.aspx
 
I'd like to point out, without taking a specific position on abortion at this time, that men's and women's views on abortion are roughly similar in distribution. That is, the percentage of men and women with pro or anti views are very similar.

In other words, characterizing this chiefly as "men trying to control women" is inaccurate; there are about as many women who are pro-life in some sense, as men.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/245618/abortion-trends-gender.aspx

And I don’t disagree with that. But there are way more men politicians than women, and men Republicans do indeed use the issue as a wedge and compete with one another to see who can pass the most restrictive laws regarding abortion, not because they are against it on a personal ethical/moral basis, but rather to gain and maintain political powers by appealing to fundie religious anti-abortion extremists.
 
Now I'd agree that a good many Republican politicians don't really care about abortion except as a wedge issue. However, I think the vast majority of pro-life activists (many of whom are women, btw) are in fact sincere, believe that abortion ends a human life, and that it is a tragedy and an offense against humanity. I feel confident in this assertion, because I'm sure I know a lot more of them than you do, and they are very sincere. Mischaracterising the nature of the issue doesn't help anyone.
The sincerity may be genuine but the basic argument "killing a fetus is wrong and an offense against humanity" represents a religious ideology that intrudes into the lives of people outside of their anti-abortion denomination that they legally have no business interfering with.

It is a horrifyingly callous religious belief that women should give birth to an unwanted child which they know will condemn their families, spouses, partners, already born children and eventually the potential child itself to almost certain lives of hardship, permanent poverty, possible incarceration, homelessness, mental illness, crime, disease, addiction. That is real tragedy which the anti-abortion advocates choose to not see.

As a group the women of the anti-abortion movement get abortions at exactly the same rate as the general public and they get these abortions for exactly the same reason: a child, or another child at this time is impossible for the family to care for in the kind of stability and safety and love that every child deserves in order to grow into a whole, competent, responsible adult. That they can see this in their own families but not in other families creates quite a lot of suspicion about their sincerity.
 
They just use it as a wedge issue for political purposes. That is true--they really don't care about abortion, per se, they just want to have use it as a political hammer to appeal to the evangelical fundie Christians. I would be willing to bet that a good number of men politicians and men chatters on this forum and Republican men elsewhere just use it as another reason to vent their fake outrage, and we would probably be surprised at how many of them even paid for an abortion for a woman of their sexual acquaintance. I'm talking Trump here, for instance.
Fact is that abortion should indeed be up to the woman without the interference of men politicians in the various red states passing more and more extreme anti-abortion bills to see if they can outdo one another. Morally, ethically, they really don't care. It's just all about POLITICAL POWER to them, nothing else.
They are usually too cheap to pay for them.
 
I'm as against abortion as anyone here and I've never paid for an abortion. For that matter no woman I know has to my knowledge ever gotten an abortion. So though you are "willing to bet" you are in fact..wrong.
Congratulations on the extensive sampling technique for you study on abortions.
 
Did you guys realize that no republican, or their wives, or their daughters or their mistresses have ever had an abortion?
 
The sincerity may be genuine but the basic argument "killing a fetus is wrong and an offense against humanity" represents a religious ideology that intrudes into the lives of people outside of their anti-abortion denomination that they legally have no business interfering with.

It is a horrifyingly callous religious belief that women should give birth to an unwanted child which they know will condemn their families, spouses, partners, already born children and eventually the potential child itself to almost certain lives of hardship, permanent poverty, possible incarceration, homelessness, mental illness, crime, disease, addiction. That is real tragedy which the anti-abortion advocates choose to not see.

As a group the women of the anti-abortion movement get abortions at exactly the same rate as the general public and they get these abortions for exactly the same reason: a child, or another child at this time is impossible for the family to care for in the kind of stability and safety and love that every child deserves in order to grow into a whole, competent, responsible adult. That they can see this in their own families but not in other families creates quite a lot of suspicion about their sincerity.


A lot of unproven assumptions there.

I'll grant that the majority of anti-abortion activists are religiously motivated, but I've known non-religious people who were strongly anti-abortion as well.

Are all abortions motivated by avoiding a catastrophic consequence as you describe? I'm sure many are motivated by a belief that having a child at that time would result in serious negative outcomes, but the assumption that every aborted child would have been a disaster in the making is still an assumption.

"As a group, the women of the anti-abortion movement get abortions at exactly the same rate..." I'm not sure how this could even be determined to be true. I doubt it is on the questionnaire at the clinic. I do know a few women who became anti-abortion after having had one, stating that experience itself (and aftermath) turned them against the idea. I don't know how common that is, offhand.

I am not, myself, an advocate of banning all abortions. My views on the matter are complicated and cannot be reduced to a sound-bite statement. It is ironic that I find myself explaining these things here, but I think it serves no one to mischaracterize the supporters of one position.
 
Actually it is opinion. The opinion of a previous Supreme Court, but always highly controversial.

The Constitution does not specifically mention abortion. The SCOTUS opinion that made it a constitutional right was based on an *implied* right to medical privacy.

That remains controversial and there is some chance it could be overturned.

I'm not advocating a position, btw, just correcting an error. SCOTUS decisions are not easily changed but they're not necessarily eternal either.

I guess that's true, but then just like other rights unenumerated (And RvW did reference the 9th Amendment) the right of adults to have consensual sex is only an opinion. And the right for a person to have offspring is also only an opinion.

What makes them more than 'just opinions' is that to PREVENT people from exercising those rights, it would violate their enumerated Const. rights, like due process (the 14th) and 'security of the person' (the 4th). Minnie lists many of the precedents as well.
 
I'll grant that the majority of anti-abortion activists are religiously motivated, but I've known non-religious people who were strongly anti-abortion as well.

If abortion is morally wrong, why did the courts recognize a woman's right to have one?

It's a decision that came about once a medical procedure was proven safer than giving birth. Once abortion was a safer procedure, there was no longer any foundation for banning it electively, in the guise of 'protecting women.' The decision was not about protecting the unborn.
And they were unequivocal about that. (court decision quotes available on request)

Abortion 14 times safer than pregnancy
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Getting a legal abortion is much safer than giving birth, suggests a new U.S. study published Monday.​
Researchers found that women were about 14 times more likely to die during or after giving birth to a live baby than to die from complications of an abortion.​
link

So the courts today are shirking their responsibilities (as did the previous benches with their ambiguity) in not answering that question, within the context of the rights recognized in the Const. And there are several court challenges before SCOTUS right now, including the TX case, which they punted on, and MS.

Of course my post is for anyone to consider and respond to, not just Goshin.
 
I'll grant that the majority of anti-abortion activists are religiously motivated, but I've known non-religious people who were strongly anti-abortion as well.
I do not disagree.
Are all abortions motivated by avoiding a catastrophic consequence as you describe?
Well since nobody aborts a pregnancy they desire, then, I have to assume when a woman aborts an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy she feels that having a baby at that time would be a catastrophe for her or her family.
I'm sure many are motivated by a belief that having a child at that time would result in serious negative outcomes, but the assumption that every aborted child would have been a disaster in the making is still an assumption.
A book called the "TurnAway Study" has studied the outcome the children of mothers who were denied or could not get to a clinic for an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. The findings are very discouraging to read.

Consequences of Unintended Pregnancy
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK232137/
(some conclusions)
..........unintended pregnancy has serious consequences. these consequences are not confined only to unintended pregnancies occurring to teenagers or unmarried women and couples; in fact, unintended pregnancy can carry serious consequences at all ages and life stages. First, unintended pregnancy often leads to abortion, a fact that underscores a point made at the outset of this report: reducing unintended pregnancy would dramatically decrease the incidence of abortion.
................unintended pregnancies—especially those that are unwanted (as distinct from mistimed)—carry appreciable risks for children, women, men, and families. That is, unintendedness itself poses an added, independent burden beyond whatever might be present because of other factors, including the demographic attributes of the mother in particular.
.......The child of an unwanted conception is at greater risk of weighing less than 2,500 grams at birth, of dying in its first year of life, of being abused, and of not receiving sufficient resources for healthy development. The mother may be at greater risk of physical abuse herself, and her relationship with her partner is at greater risk of dissolution. Both mother and father may suffer economic hardship and fail to achieve their educational and career goals.

What would be your guess as to the adulthood of children from such families. I would expect undesirable outcomes to increase if Roe is overturned.

"As a group, the women of the anti-abortion movement get abortions at exactly the same rate..." I'm not sure how this could even be determined to be true. I doubt it is on the questionnaire at the clinic.
It is on the questionnaire at responsible women's reproductive clinics. The Guttmacher Institute compiled these results.
Research has consistently shown that the majority of people who obtain an abortion have a religious affiliation.
17% of abortion patients identified as mainline Protestant;
13% as evangelical Protestant;
24% as Catholic;
38% reported no religious affiliation; and
8% reported some other affiliation.
(Those that identify as evangelical Protestant are almost 100% anti-abortion. Those that identify as Catholic also are overwhelmingly anti-abortion. If even 10% of the mainline Protestants are conservative Lutheran or other mainline anti-abortion churches then anti-abortion and pro-choice groups are about the same)



I do know a few women who became anti-abortion after having had one, stating that experience itself (and aftermath) turned them against the idea. I don't know how common that is, offhand.
It is not common. Most women believe that abortion was the right thing to do and are satisfied that they had one.
"Five Years After Abortion, Nearly All Women Say It Was the Right Decision, Study Finds
Even Those Who Struggled to Make the Abortion Decision Supported it Years Later"

I think it serves no one to mischaracterize the supporters of one position.
The links are all there for the studies I've cited. I believe they are all reliable sources. If you believe there has been mischaracterization contact the authors of the studies.
 
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Are all abortions motivated by avoiding a catastrophic consequence as you describe? I'm sure many are motivated by a belief that having a child at that time would result in serious negative outcomes, but the assumption that every aborted child would have been a disaster in the making is still an assumption.
I forgot to say that not every aborted fetus would have been a disaster. But here is one more quote that gives some meaning to what happens to unwanted and/or neglected and abused children when they become adults. There are over 600,000 children in foster care right now. These are children from families that can't, won't or don't care about their children. Many of them started out as unplanned and unwanted pregnancies.

"One study showed that more than 90% of youth in foster care with five or more moves will become involved in the juvenile justice system. Another study found that by age 17, over half of youth in foster care experienced an arrest, conviction, or overnight stay in a correctional facility. "

80% of all inmates are former foster children
 
I forgot to say that not every aborted fetus would have been a disaster. But here is one more quote that gives some meaning to what happens to unwanted and/or neglected and abused children when they become adults. There are over 600,000 children in foster care right now. These are children from families that can't, won't or don't care about their children. Many of them started out as unplanned and unwanted pregnancies.

"One study showed that more than 90% of youth in foster care with five or more moves will become involved in the juvenile justice system. Another study found that by age 17, over half of youth in foster care experienced an arrest, conviction, or overnight stay in a correctional facility. "

80% of all inmates are former foster children


I will grant you those are some tragic, hard truths. I'm not claiming I have all the answers to all the questions around this issue; I don't. It's all fracked up, and unfracking it is going to be a long hard job.
 
I'd like to point out, without taking a specific position on abortion at this time, that men's and women's views on abortion are roughly similar in distribution. That is, the percentage of men and women with pro or anti views are very similar.
In other words, characterizing this chiefly as "men trying to control women" is inaccurate; there are about as many women who are pro-life in some sense, as men.https://news.gallup.com/poll/245618/abortion-trends-gender.aspx
The anti-abortion movement was started by two men,Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich. It is funded by male fundraisers, the money raising arm in anti-abortion organizations are largely run by men, policies are made by men, the financing is done by men, and the staffing is often mostly men. Men are writing the restrictive laws limiting abortion. Men are voting them into law. Men are enforcing them. One has to ask themselves why are men so interested in this question. Just look at who posts on the abortion sub-forum. What is the men's real goal by being anti-abortion. What are they hoping to achieve?
 
The anti-abortion movement was started by two men,Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich. It is funded by male fundraisers, the money raising arm in anti-abortion organizations are largely run by men, policies are made by men, the financing is done by men, and the staffing is often mostly men. Men are writing the restrictive laws limiting abortion. Men are voting them into law. Men are enforcing them. One has to ask themselves why are men so interested in this question. Just look at who posts on the abortion sub-forum. What is the men's real goal by being anti-abortion. What are they hoping to achieve?

You forgot one word. In front of each word “men” put the word “Republican”. They do so in order to gain the fundamentalist Christian anti-abortion extremist vote and thus remain in power so that they can make more lax laws about guns and change the laws such that Republican state legislatures will, in the future, decide the presidential electors themselves, popular vote be damned.
 
Actually it is opinion. The opinion of a previous Supreme Court, but always highly controversial.

The Constitution does not specifically mention abortion. The SCOTUS opinion that made it a constitutional right was based on an *implied* right to medical privacy.

That remains controversial and there is some chance it could be overturned.

I'm not advocating a position, btw, just correcting an error. SCOTUS decisions are not easily changed but they're not necessarily eternal either.
SCOTUS opinions establish precedent and are as good as constitutional law. While the SCOTUS can overturn previous rulings, it has never, in its entire history, revoke rights once granted or recognized.
 
Actually it is opinion. The opinion of a previous Supreme Court, but always highly controversial.

The Constitution does not specifically mention abortion. The SCOTUS opinion that made it a constitutional right was based on an *implied* right to medical privacy.

That remains controversial and there is some chance it could be overturned.

I'm not advocating a position, btw, just correcting an error. SCOTUS decisions are not easily changed but they're not necessarily eternal either.
The SCOTUS decision didn't make abortion a constitutional right. They referred to five constitutional rights, the 1st, 4th, 9th, 10th, and 14th Amendments.

It was not just an implied right to medical privacy. The 4th is not just an implied right - you have the right not to searched without warrant and to keep medical records private - it's not just some penumbra.

There's no justification for claiming an embryo or fetus has any rights because in the 94 places in the Constitution that the word "person" was used, no one can possibly think on an originalist basis that it was intended to refer to them. They were never counted in the Census, either, because it has to be an exact enumeration, not a projected count. And no state has been able to get a majority of voters to vote for the Fetal Personhood Amendment, not even the most anti-abortion state, Mississippi.

Moreover, there were precedents for Roe v Wade (e.g., the contraception decisions) and Planned Parenthood v Casey and various other SC decisions were added, so that it now has a string of precedents.

So if the current SC wants to change the decision, they not only have to break with precedent, but with lots of precedent. If they were to do that, it would be for the Thomas reason - that the states have the right to decide because the fed doesn't protect individual rights in family-related matters, e.g., marriage, contraception, children's education, etc. - and not on a basis that fetus's have rights.

The trouble for them is that the only people on the SC who would do it are Roman Catholics (Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) and one person who was raised RC and became an Anglican in his late 20s to marry a non-RC woman (Gorsuch). Of the three who would disagree, only one was raised Catholic and the two others are Jewish. That would look much like imposing a Catholic-informed view on non-Catholics.
 
They are usually too cheap to pay for them.
Childbirth in a hospital is way more expensive than an early abortion, $10,000-15,000 to $350-500. Moreover, if women continue pregnancies, there is usually need for prenatal for at least three months and there are also expenses after childbirth, not only for the kid, but for all the physical problems attendant on childbirth.
 
If abortion is morally wrong, why did the courts recognize a woman's right to have one?

It's a decision that came about once a medical procedure was proven safer than giving birth. Once abortion was a safer procedure, there was no longer any foundation for banning it electively, in the guise of 'protecting women.' The decision was not about protecting the unborn.
And they were unequivocal about that. (court decision quotes available on request)

Abortion 14 times safer than pregnancy
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Getting a legal abortion is much safer than giving birth, suggests a new U.S. study published Monday.​
Researchers found that women were about 14 times more likely to die during or after giving birth to a live baby than to die from complications of an abortion.​
link

So the courts today are shirking their responsibilities (as did the previous benches with their ambiguity) in not answering that question, within the context of the rights recognized in the Const. And there are several court challenges before SCOTUS right now, including the TX case, which they punted on, and MS.

Of course my post is for anyone to consider and respond to, not just Goshin.
Yes, and early abortion, probably meaning chemical abortion in the first 10 weeks, is 22-24 times safer.
 
If abortion is morally wrong, why did the courts recognize a woman's right to have one?

What makes you think that court decisions in the U.S are or should be based on "morals"?
 
They just use it as a wedge issue for political purposes. That is true--they really don't care about abortion, per se, they just want to have use it as a political hammer to appeal to the evangelical fundie Christians. I would be willing to bet that a good number of men politicians and men chatters on this forum and Republican men elsewhere just use it as another reason to vent their fake outrage, and we would probably be surprised at how many of them even paid for an abortion for a woman of their sexual acquaintance. I'm talking Trump here, for instance.
Fact is that abortion should indeed be up to the woman without the interference of men politicians in the various red states passing more and more extreme anti-abortion bills to see if they can outdo one another. Morally, ethically, they really don't care. It's just all about POLITICAL POWER to them, nothing else.
And you know this because?
I know plenty of right wing men who care about abortion, who work to end it, to raise money for that cause and participate actively in organizations that do so.
 
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