Caitlin Huey-Burns writes for CBS News that the states most likely to ban abortion are the states LEAST likely to provide resources for children. Their politicians love the unborn. The born and living, not so much.
The expectation that Supreme Court is about to scrap decades of federal protections of abortion rights is highlighting another issue: the lack of resources and support available for women to have and raise children.
More women living in states without abortion access, should Roe v. Wade be overturned, will likely carry to term. Yet, not one of the two dozen states with laws on the books restricting abortion access offers paid family leave.
Eight of them have opted out of expanding Medicaid coverage under the health care law, which covers pregnancy through postpartum for low-income Americans.
And Mississippi, whose abortion restriction law is at the heart of an impending Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, ranks as the state with the highest rate of young child poverty and low birth weight and among the highest when it comes to infant mortality rates.
It is also ironic that the states with the most horrible history of racism are likely to see an increase in their black population, since impoverished black women are not likely to have the money to travel to a state where abortion is protected by law. Over many years, the black population in Mississippi may grow large enough to demand a change in the political order.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is an inverse relationship between poverty and voting.
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Because neither party provides anything to people in poverty. If Democrats provided any iota of concrete relief for the bottom third of incomes, the poor would show up for them in droves.
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Dienne
In your rush to condemn Dems, you oversimplify,
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“In your rush to condemn Dems, you oversimplify,”
Yup.
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Linda,
That comment was true, but was also the understatement of the year!
Putin is the victim! Ukraine is the aggressive Nazis! And Democrats do nothing for the poor and that’s why dienne77 votes to keep the Supreme Court in right wing hands.
Maybe dienne77 doesn’t notice how many poor people have been disenfranchised thanks to her vote to empower the Republicans and keep the Supreme Court right wing.
If dienne77’s hatred of Democrats didn’t hurt the people in poverty and prevent any iota of concrete relief for the bottom third of incomes, maybe the poor would be able to vote for progressive candidates.
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@NYC Public School Parent. Your diehard defense of Democrats and your hyperbolic criticism of dienne77 is so typical and so devoid of truth, it’s one of the exact reasons why we are where we are.
Democrats are feckless and have no desire or intention of changing this countries’ trajectory. My proof? HISTORY. The Dems have become center-right and spend more time and energy going after the voters they lost than the people they have. They try to be everything to everyone that they have become nothing.
Obama could have signed the Freedom of Choice Act on his first day in office, as promised, but he didn’t. He had a Democratic congress too! Why? Go ask him. This was 2008, and he obviously knew Roe was on the skids. He promised immigration reform, but that didn’t happen either. Why? My Dem congressman told a local immigration activist that they were “looking to the midterms,” which they lost!
And now we have Manchin and Sinema supposedly holding the party hostage because things are “too partisan”? Like the GOP doesn’t steamroll what they want when they’re in power, to hell with partisanship? Did you not notice the time and vitriol Pelosi heaped on the Squad? It often seemed she hated them more than she hated Trump. Why? Because they’re more of a threat to the status quo that she enjoys than Trump is.
If you really think this country started to go to hell in a hand basket when Trump came into power, you’re ignoring history. Who “ended welfare as we know it” and was super proud of that fact? Who set in place what was needed for mass incarceration of Black and brown folks? Who signed Nafta? Who has failed time and time again to stop the GOP?
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@Laura
Roe v. Wade is gone. How’s that working out for ya?
Voter Rights are in danger. How’s that working out for ya?
How can I not blame the people who knew without a doubt that their vote would determine the direction of the Supreme Court when it was 4 justices on the right, and 4 on the left with an empty seat left open? It’s not often we as voters have a chance to change a Supreme Court and we know it will happen depending on who wins the presidency.
If you wanted progressive politicians and thought you’d have a better chance without any guarantee of voting rights and keeping Citizens’ United in place, then you are far more to blame than those who smear “the Democrats”, which just happens to INCLUDE the squad.
Your right wing propaganda about Nancy Pelosi and the squad is just that — right wing propaganda. I can google it and read about in every far right news site — so I imagine that’s where you got it.
If you want to see what “heaping vitriol” on the squad looks like, I suggest you listen to the mainstream Republican party. And I suggest you read your own post.
If you want to hear what constructive criticism is, then listen to AOC and the squad, and listen to Bernie Sanders. They would all be appalled to hear someone trying to minimize the REAL vitriol that they are subject to by mischaracterizing Nancy Pelosi’s criticism as “vitriol”.
The squad and Pelosi have policy disagreements. They criticize each other on policies, and what compromises to make to achieve some of those policies. That is fine. That is good. That is democracy. But AOC and the squad do not spew the lies you just did and claim that Pelosi hates them more than Trump. AOC and the squad do not and have never tried to smear the entire Democratic party. They criticize with the truth — they do not demonize with exaggerations and they never spew the very same false narratives pushed by the far right to divide us.
I also find it mystifying that you ONLY see the bad and you (intentionally?) ignore the good when you hate someone. Do you hate Jimmy Carter too with such ferocity? Is Jimmy Carter as evil as Pelosi to you? After all, Jimmy Carter was responsible for blocking America having universal health care in the late 1970s. And Jimmy Carter changed the Democrats from being a party of progressive economic ideas to one that abandoned the working class and started the corporate democrat revolution.
Do you know how I know that about Jimmy Carter? Because in 1980, I was spewing the same attacks on Jimmy Carter that you spew on the Democrats — I even thought Jimmy Carter “stole” the primary from Ted Kennedy. Like you, I smeared all the Democrats and I decided it was much better that Carter and the Dems go down to defeat, because it would be no different to have Reagan.
So your post just sounds like an ignorant 1980 college student – me – who decided that the way to the progressive future I envisioned was to soundly defeat Jimmy Carter and the Democrats. And we had great success — Carter and so many “not good enough” Democrat Senators went down to defeat. And what did we “win” with our “victory”? 12 years of Republican rule. And a Democrat who finally won who was abandoned by the same voters who elected him as soon as he tried to do something progressive — universal healthcare.
You can hate Jimmy Carter and blame him for the rightward movement of the Democratic party, but maybe it’s about time to blame the voters who don’t seem to support the progressives or have no patience.
The only reason we have most programs that progressives like — Medicare, Medicaid, environmental protections, worker protections — is because of very flawed Democrats like Truman and LBJ.
Jimmy Carter supported some bad policies. Same is true of Bernie Sanders, Obama and Clinton. But unlike the Republicans, they also supported very good policies. We have the Affordable Care Act – the first step to Medicare for All – because of Obama. If you don’t think that is an accomplishment, then I have a 1975 universal health care plan everyone believed would soon pass to sell you.
The depressing thing is that we are going backwards not because of the democrats but because of voters who are so impatient to have everything or nothing that they keep empowering the Republicans and then this country takes 2 steps backwards and when a Dem finally wins, those folks are angry because the Democrat hasn’t moved them 5 steps ahead from where they were before the Republicans moved them back.
The right wing was far more patient. They took their small victories and kept empowering the far right more.
It is good to be critical of Democratic leaders but do not demonize them with right wing propaganda.
That is what folks do with teachers’ unions, too. It’s fine to criticize Randi Weingarten, but if you spew such demonization of Randi and the union that the public believes that the union is worthless and harmful and needs to be defeated at all costs, what have you gained? Do you really think that will lead to a progressive union? It simply weakens the union and leads to more people deciding the union is worthless. After all, what good do they do?
That rhetoric is what always undermines and eventually destroys good progressive things. False equivalencies where folks amplify everything that is bad about the union and ignore every single thing that the union does that is good.
AOC gets it. Listen to her and she never demonizes Pelosi the way you just did. Neither does Bernie.
Do you think my condemnation of Jimmy Carter’s right wing corporate way of being a Democrat and empowering Reagan and the Republicans did any good? Was it even the truth? Was Jimmy Carter really that evil, or was I just foolishly helping the right wing take power? What’s your answer?
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Well said.
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Sadly true
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The people behind this don’t give a fig about the unborn. What they care about is controlling women who have gotten far too uppity and are challenging male hegemony, a decidedly un-Christian attitude.
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I assume you meant “least likely to provide resources”?
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Flerp-
Chris Hayes on MSNBC (May 4, 2022) provides context for your talking points in a prior thread about the critical importance of the SCOTUS leak. The segment title is, “Why the right doesn’t want to talk about abortion.”
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I don’t watch television, Linda — what’s the upshot of the segment?
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The right wants to talk about how the privacy of the poor “justices” was violated.
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Flerp
I watched the segment on-line. The part that relates to your opinion is at the beginning and covered in the first few minutes.
I prefer to read because it is quicker. However, I won’t dismiss info. if it is in video form.
Commenter jcgrim added comment in a recent Ravitch post (Tennessee Commissioner of Education). Grim’s link to an interview with Frank Shaeffer is worth viewing. Shaeffer identifies himself as creating the anti-abortion movement.
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Bob
Adding to your synopsis – the outrage at the leak was contrived and part of the playbook. It came from the GOP hierarchy. Hayes shows various people like Ted Cruz parroting the tasing points.
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Bob, I assume the right thinks the decision itself will play badly for Republicans in the midterms, and thus they prefer to focus attention to the leak. It will be interesting to see how they react if it turns out that the leak came from one of the conservative Justices’ chambers.
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Thanks for the Frank Schaefer reference. He is an interesting guy. It reminded me of a Christian T-Shirt salesman I met when we failed to make a flight connection in Detroit about about 2004. He was returning from a convention where he sold T-shirts with slogans on them.
After the third scotch he complained to us that he was dreadfully disappointed with his evangelical brethren. He illustrated his sorrow with a t-shirt that never sold. It had a few children looking from behind bars and was juxtaposed with the caption: “If you have done it to the least of these…”
Yeah, it never sold.
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Shaeffer’s commentary is damning.
A self-admitted selfish 19-year-old convinced himself that making a dollar peddling anti-abortion propaganda was a good idea. It led to power and money- hungry false prophets exploiting an evangelical base, short on brains.
Shaeffer’s telling of Billy Graham’s position on abortion was interesting.
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
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Wow, great story, Roy!
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Did you see the tweet by a typical right wing legal scholar – a professor at George Mason University Law School who made an utterly despicable racist remark (which I am loathe to even repeat, but basically associated being stupid with being Latina?)
Bob Shepherd, you are absolutely correct when you said “The right wants to talk about how the privacy of the poor “justices” was violated.”
And those who can always be counted on to amplify the right wing views here immediately did their thing and claimed (without one iota of evidence) that leaking an already written majority decision would cause some exaggerated harm that will destroy the “norms” of the Supreme Court. “Norms” that of course haven’t existed since the far right took over, but hey, the far right wants to pretend their knowledge that a few years in the future their opinion would be leaked earlier than they wanted forced them to start breaking norms years before this leak!
It is nonsensical like most right wing propaganda. It is the same manufactured outrage that we saw when the right wing viciously attacked a decorated soldier for “leaking” that a US President was extorting a foreign leader — “leaking” that a a sitting president was hijacking the execution of lawfully mandated aid for his own personal political gain — after this soldier’s whistleblower complaints were quashed by the corrupt folks surrounding the president.
We live in a country where one side would rather demonize and punish or even execute someone who tells the truth than actually have a real discussion about the content of the opinion.
That’s why their enablers immediately repeated the right wing talking points where the leak is an outrage — to hijack the conversation about whether the decision itself is the outrage. Only one party does that. The Democrats always are willing to have a conversation defending their views.
The Republicans are always willing to attack anyone who points out what is wrong with their views.
Why are Republicans so obsessed with trying to attack the motives of those who question their position – and the lack of any solid reasoning behind – when they could simply defend their position?
Because they have no convincing defense and they want to change to the subject so their most reprehensible actions are no longer reported and are immediately forgotten.
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@NYC Parent. “We live in a country where one side would rather demonize and punish or even execute someone who tells the truth than actually have a real discussion about the content of the opinion.”
Yes, Dems loved the CIA whistleblower than lead to trump’s impeachment. But the whistleblowers who exposed US imperialism? Not so much. Snowden made the US government look like Big Brother. For that, Clinton said he was working for Russia or China. Obama called him a traitor. Chelsea Manning exposed crimes against humanity, and was convicted of the Espionage Act.
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@ Laura
President Obama commuted Chelsea Manning’s 35 year prison sentence to free her. Manning did not flee to Russia like Snowden.
Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers. He was charged and stood trial. He wasn’t found guilty because a judge dismissed charges. Ellsberg did not flee to Russia like Snowden.
Both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton said Snowden should stand trial. Are you going to say something nasty about Bernie?
Dems believe in the rule of law. A trial where Snowden could have been exonerated. Meanwhile, in 2013 Trump was spewing nonsense about executing him.
The position of Bernie Sanders and the Democrats was perfectly ethical and you act as if they are no different than the Republicans who are ready to punish proper whistleblowers! Who haven’t committed a crime because they went through whistleblower procedures!
(You might recall that Snowden seems to have lied and made claims that he tried to do this as a whistleblower but amazingly, this tech wizard didn’t manage to save a single record of his attempts to do this as a whistleblower.)
Your hijacking of this discussion makes no sense (unless you hate progressives).
There is a difference between leaks of classified information and leaks of non-classified information that the right wing Republican Party that is working to destroy the progressives in this country don’t want the public to be talking about.
Why would you try to equate the two unless you are trying to normalize the progressive-hating Republican party?
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Joel-
Media and faculty protection of the Catholic Church is noxious and harmful to democracy. Balmer’s article is as egregious as it is predictable in its omission. Paul Weyrich was Catholic
“Evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement.” Balmer should read about the link between Ryan Girdusky and Pat Buchanan (an interview posted at Buchanan’s site).
When Roe is overturned, it won’t be by fundamentalists protestants (there aren’t any on the court).
The state Catholic Conferences, the political arm of the bishops, are every bit as engaged, if not more, in school privatization as are protestant evangelicals.
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I think that your first sentence is mixed up. States most likely to ban abortion are least likely (not most likely) to provide resources for children.
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Do the rePUG-ni-CONS want SLAVES? I think so.
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Yup. And LOL. Love the turn on the term. Maybe Pug-Cons for short?
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The best summary I have read about the hypocrisy of overturning Roe V Wade comes from a Methodist minister.
“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.
You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe.
Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.“
– Dave Barnhart
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A very important argument to post – thanks.
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awesome
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There is definitely irony regarding the abortion issue. If Republicans voted only according to their economic interests, they would favor abortion being widespread. Several years ago Planned Parenthood noted that around 85% of abortions are obtained by lower income women, with the incidence of abortion highest among black women. That demographic votes heavily Democratic, and their kids would, too. And most of the biological fathers would provide little to no financial support to their children, so public assistance costs would increase significantly.
Think about it: fewer kids born to poor women means lower welfare costs and many fewer future Democratic voters. If Republicans voted for their economic and political interests – rather than for their moral beliefs – they would volunteer to drive women to abortion clinics.
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The only connection between religious “morality” and the zeal against abortion was stated by right winger, Robert P George and others- the view that access to abortion results in promiscuity. It is the reason birth control is also targeted.
Right wing religion accepts with a wink, male promiscuity e.g. excuses for “flawed” men and sister wives but, it’s not tolerated in women.
When we hear women say both of the statements, “all of us are sinners” and “conception begins at birth”, we’re hearing religious brainwashing. Women will join churches where they are denied the right to be leaders. Men wouldn’t join an organization where they were 2nd class citizens.
Btw- based on rates of adultery and rates of incarceration for violence and theft, contrasting men versus women, one of the two segments have many, many more “sinners”. Leave it to the conservative church to craft a message, “we’re all sinners” so that women with low level infractions feel guilt.
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“conception begins at birth”
I really struggled with that “concept” for awhile. I haven’t swallowed the “original sin” argument for a long time, but “conception at birth” really threw me for a loop. 🙂
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“life begins at conception”, you deduced that, I assume.
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Yes. Note the smiley face. No criticism intended. I knew exactly what you meant. I found the mental gymnastics amusing.
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sped-
Conservative churches should not be separated from the Roe v. Wade discussion. On that basis, I thought the following articles’ research had relevance, “Passive-Aggression Among….”, posted at Sunstone, 4-12-2013, by Michael J. Stevens.
A less compassionate version about the same topic is at Medium, 5-30-2019, “The More Religious You Are, The More Likely You Are to be Passive-Aggressive, Here’s Why.”
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Linda: re the Conception begins line. I meant what you knew and never caught anything odd until this conversation.
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Thank you, Ray. You nailed what I meant but blew so badly.
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“I meant what you knew”- thanks for the laugh.
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Life begins at 50!
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Doesn’t life begin when Republican white men say it does? When it benefits them?
There is no consistency to that. If they personally benefit from a woman having an abortion, they would pay for that abortion. If they personally benefit from supporting legislation that forces child victims of incest and rape to give birth to their attacker’s baby, they oppose all abortion.
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Alito Citation Of Sir Matthew Hale 1609-1676 In Alito Leaked Opinion. Hale sentenced 2 Women To Death For Witchcraft. And Wrote Husband Never Guilty Of Rape On His Lawful Wife.
“Hale was an excellent judge/jurist. His central legacy coming through his written work. But his execution of 2+ women for witchcraft, his defense of marital rape, and his belief that capital punishment should extend to those as young as 14 brings this into question.”
Wikipedia
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So, he held the same views as Alito does on all these issues. What’s your point?
LOL
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And, Kathy Irwin, aren’t you women supposed to be silent in churches?
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So Diane’s blog qualifies as a church? Does that mean she doesn’t have to pay taxes?😀
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So Diane’s blog qualifies as a church? Does that mean she doesn’t have to pay taxes?
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No one has to pay taxes! That’s big Socialist govermint!!! Except, according to Rick Scott, who said in his new contract for America that the poorest people should pay some tax so that they have skin in the game. So, tax the poor. It’s the American Way!!!
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In case I have to spell that last out for you:
“For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” Matt. 18:20
So, every meeting in a public forum is a congregation, and
“As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says.” –1 Cor. 14:34-35
QED
The Alito Way: Back to the future. I mean way, way, way back.
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I think that Alito and his ilk would be quite happy if we all went to sleep and woke up in The Handmaid’s Tale.
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Guardian reports that ADF spent $23.3 mil. in Europe between 2008 and 2019. Guardian identifies DeVos, Erik Prince, Heritage Foundation (Koch), etc. as funders. Max Fisher correlated limits on abortion with backsliding democracies.
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Fisher is right.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2022/05/04/on-the-dobbs-decision-it-can-happen-it-is-happening-here/
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Thanks, Ms. Irwin, for the quotation re: Hale.
If these fools think that women are going to be silent about this, they have a think coming.
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“Anti-Abortion Misogyny: It’s Never About the Children”, at Breakthrough site
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Nailed it. It’s all about misogyny.
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The current law doesn’t Force anyone to do anything they don’t feel
secure doing. Changing the law will Force women into doing something they do not feel secure doing. Of course its about Misogyny.
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Always learning- if only women, all of them, would stop enabling the GOP- whether it is supporting the conservative churches that politick for the right wing or voting Republican.
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I recommend a Lysistrata strategy. lol
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So true. It’s a war on women.
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The Republican Party just declared war on women and erected a barrier around its redoubt in the Supreme Court.
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To repeat: Everything is easy to understand when you realize that the opposition to Roe was really about Brown. All the hypocrisy from the lack of concern after 24 weeks to insisting the mistress has an abortion then makes sense .
Abortion like other healthcare is only needed when it is needed. And most people tend not to think they will need it. Yet it will always be accessible to those who make it un-accessible to others.
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It may not be easy or financially safe for women to leave one of the RED fascist zombie MAGA states to get an abortion in a state where it is still legal. Even if a nonprofit paid all the expenses for a poor woman’s out of state abortion, that nonprofit might still end up being taken to court in Texas.
Texas law: “The law allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone else who helps a woman obtain an abortion — including those who give a woman a ride to a clinic or provide financial assistance to obtain an abortion. Private citizens who bring these suits don’t need to show any connection to those they are suing. The law makes no exceptions for cases involving rape or incest.”
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/01/1033202132/texas-abortion-ban-what-happens-next
Since there are voters in every RED state that do not vote for Republican candidates, they are now becoming inmates in a MAGA concentration camp.
During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, children were encouraged to turn in their parents, teachers and neighbors if suspected of not supporting the Cultural Revolution. Millions suffered. Millions died, often suicide to escape the mental and physical torture. I knew a Chinese woman, a Christian, who was afraid to pray during most of the Mao era, fearing her children would see her doing it and turn her in. That woman became my mother-in-law in 1999.
The MAGA controlled GOP is now leading a reverse Cultural Revolution in the US, one that does not support the working man and freedom from tyranny but supports fundamentalist freaks that call themselves Christians (when they aren’t) and/or billionaires like Charles Koch, a so-called Catholic that doesn’t like the current Pope because that Pope doesn’t support Koch’s thinking.
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Lloyd-
Thank you for challenging standard practice which is used to protect an enemy from being identified (your final paragraph).
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tRumpublicns are pro-life, until birth!
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yup
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So when does a human life begin? That one is much harder than anyone imagines. It is my feeling that the question of when life begins is not a scientific one. Scientists view life as falling in a continuum. The Sperm moves, is it not alive by comparison to the zygote? The implanted, fertilized egg has a pretty good chance of developing, but it cannot exist without a connection to its provider of nutrition, the mother.
Social forces have provided many answers to this question. Societies have looked the other way when infanticide kept away famine. New children have been left to the wolves, pampered, ignored, or valued as labor.
The problem with this whole issue is that we did not confront it legislatively in 1950 or so when the process of purposely ending a pregnancy became a thing that could be done without much immediate medical harm to the mother. The court should never have been the one to decide this. Not that this is unique. The court had to decide to do something about the Southern Apartheid called Jim Crow. It was necessary that it rule on many other issues over the decades.
The beginning of human life is incremental. There is no logic to declare when it begins or ends. Perhaps it starts with the hopes and dreams of a family that wants a child or two. Perhaps it starts without any consideration at all. Perhaps in ends painlessly in aged sleep or tragically by some accident. It begins in a very personal pain and ends often with a general societal grieving. Not any of this process needs to be described by law. It should be a process that the individual arrives at in conjunction with its intimate society, its group, its family in the most general application of this idea.
We all decide when to make life decisions. Government should allow for these decisions to be made in private. Like Diane expressed a couple of days ago, I consider the idea of an abortion an anathema. But, when my daughter was on the way as we reached middle age, I cannot escape the fear we had that she would be born with some malady that would saddle society with our problem. That someone would have decided differently should not make them a lawbreaker.
The constitution grants us a right of conscience and belief in the first amendment. That is enough to imply a right of medical privacy. Most people I know believe that life begins at conception due to their religious training or religious interpretation of the world. If we have a right to freedom of religion, then we must have a right to terminate a pregnancy if our thinking does not regard the developing fetus as a human just yet, for it is fundamentally about belief. Science does not answer this. What your religion tells you should not dictate my beliefs.
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“Most people I know believe that life begins at conception”
I know almost no one who believes this. That an egg is a chicken.
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If a fetus is a child, then where’s the tax deduction for the nine months the mother carries it?
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lol. A question for greater minds than mine. I suppose you would have to ask Marjorie Taylor Greene.
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“That an egg is a chicken.” 🙂
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seduktr
In another part of this comment thread, you ask, “Does that go for atheists, too?” I really think that it does. I used to be a member of a Humanist group that held weekly meetings, but I finally stopped attending because I found so many of them to be as absolutist as the religious folks are–as tied to unprovable and doubtful assertions like materialist Laplacean determinism. My judgment: many of them were practitioners of Scientism, just another religion, but a nontheistic one. Scientism is not science. There is a place for speculation about ultimate matters. That’s what metaphysics is all about. But the point is that one must begin by recognizing that this IS speculation.
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Yup. Is existence limited to what you can see or touch or is there something beyond physical reality? I am sure I am saying that poorly, but I freely admit I do not claim to have the answers. Thankfully, the answer is not up to me.
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Thanks for reading this, speduktr!!!
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Why can’t I collect Social Security at 64 and 3 months to count the time I was in the womb? Down, down the rabbit hole we go!!!
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lol
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I should have said most people I know who believe that human life begins at conception believe this due to religious belief.
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And I wonder how many male Republican lawmakers have paid for abortions for their daughters and mistresses.
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Our state rep votes with his his Republican brothers on this matter but prompted his mistress to have an abortion at some point before his political career. The publicity surrounding this issue prompted Stephen Colbert to suggest that he opposed abortion except in cases where the life of the politician is endangered
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lol
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I wonder how many Republican lawmakers are today looking at the nondisclosure agreements they made with former mistresses.
Republican lawmaker:
I oppose abortion except in situations that endanger . . .
my press reports.
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The Constitution grants a lot of unenumerated rights (it specifically says so in the Ninth Amendment), and understanding of what those rights entail changes as the world changes. The Constitution doesn’t say that people have a right to nonseizure of their cellphones. It doesn’t say that women have the right to wear pants or short dresses. But we assume that these are protected rights under the Constitution.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2022/05/04/on-the-dobbs-decision-it-can-happen-it-is-happening-here/
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The U.S. is two countries, mixed in with one another, within shared borders.
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Of note, Trevor Noah’s, “These judges make lying fun, it’s the black robe comedy starring Barrett, Alito, Kavanaugh, Thomas and Gorsuch.”
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Every night my husband and I discuss what lunacy will be coming to enforce laws criminalizing abortion. Just last night I was saying that women will have to put their menstrual history and history of sexual intercourse into an app. There’s an article on CNN about thia now. Abortion police will be stationed at medical offices to see why women are entering. When a woman miscarries, she will somehow have to prove or be tested to make sure she didn’t abort on purpose. Think it’s all crazy? I don’t. Not with all the crazies running the show. Trump was right when he said there will have to be punishment for the woman. But the Republicans won’t talk about this because they know the firestorm it will create.
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There’s an app for everything now! The 10 best period tracking apps.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320758
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Mamie,
Will they monitor your mail to see if you ordered abortion pills?
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There will emerge in the worst of these states enormous law enforcement bureaucracies dedicated to this and to other related matters. And, of course, the Alito decision is a jobs creation program for illegal drug cartels. They must be pleased as punch by this.
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Diane, I don’t rule out anything!
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All part of a larger agenda, one which is so obvious in its clumsy, vitriolic attempt to bring the USA under the control of White Fundamentalists (the term I understand was originally coined for the more intolerant evangelicals) that its reasoning starts to unravel into simple vindictiveness..
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To assist in defining fundamentalists, review an internet search of right to life and a Catholic Conference (select any state or all of them).
The state Catholic Conferences are the political arm of the bishops. They are very well connected in statehouses. While most Americans may be aware of conservative protestants like Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed, Catholic, Paul Weyrich, a co-founder of the religious right who was funded by Charles Koch, had greater influence.
The SCOTUS decision in Roe v Wade will be made by a majority of conservative Catholic jurists. There is no fundamentalist protestant on the court.
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We are two countries now within a single set of borders. And one of the clearest demarkers (that which demarcates) of those two countries is belief in superstitions from the infancy of our species.
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Women and the men who care about them should choose a hospital carefully if there is an issue with a pregnancy. Raw Story reports that Susan Collins will vote against codifying Roe V. Wade because she wants Catholic hospitals’ (1 in 6 U.S. hospitals) to be able to refuse to perform abortions. It’s only a matter of time before toxicity kills a woman because doctors won’t remove a cluster of fertilized cells that died in utero.
Theocracy’s campaign against women.
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I suspect that one reason why people get so angry and defensive when others don’t share their enthrallment to religion is that they themselves know, in their heart of hearts, that they are fooling themselves, believing in stuff for which there is ZERO evidence, because they would like it to be true.
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All fanaticism is repressed doubt.
-Jung
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Beautiful, Mamie! Thanks for sharing that!
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Does that go for atheists too?
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sped
Atheists stand up when their rights are taken away by theocrats. On occasion, they see handwriting on the wall and try to forestall the loss of their rights.
How successful have the atheists been in their “fanaticism” given the overturn of Roe?
False equivalencies usually fail for multiple reasons.
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I don’t remember calling all atheists fanatics. People have different ways of describing the infinite. Among all the various iterations there are individuals who choose to ridicule any belief that is not theirs and who actively declare their views as superior to any other by various means seemingly benign or even malignant.
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Linda: An atheist seeing the handwriting on the wall is an image I like. sorry, I tend to literalize metaphor.
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Again Roy, thanks for the laugh.
Sped,
The taking away of rights based on a legislator’s interpretation of his Bible or punishments enacted by legislators pandering to a segment of religious voters, is a far worse fate to endure than ridicule.
Trump wants to criminalize women who get abortions.
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I notice that McConnell and Trump are being quite circumspect. Not taking a victory lap. In Trump’s case, this is particularly astonishing. Trump? Lose and opportunity to crow? However, he did tell an interviewer a couple days ago, in typical Trump style, that nobody has done as much for religion as Donald Trump has.
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I don’t disagree. Separation of church and state is profoundly important. The relative importance of ridicule of one’s beliefs vs. the denial of rights is a comparison you choose to draw but is the height of absurdity as far as I am concerned. For the life of me, I cannot see what has offended you in my comments.
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Criminal convictions take away the right to vote. It’s a voter suppression method traditionally used against black people. It can also be used against women.
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We are going to see a lot of that. Women imprisoned for attempting to control their own reproduction. Men and women imprisoned for helping women to do that. Vigilantes and state violence in the war on women.
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Sped-
(1) Atheists, unlike hospitals that refuse to perform D&C’s, haven’t cost women their lives.
(2) Malignant ridicule does not have impact equal to the loss of life from toxic shock syndrome.
If your intent was not to trivialize the threat to women from religion- derived opposition to abortion, I can understand why you are flummoxed.
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I believe my comments began with the question of whether atheists could be fanatics, too, after a quote by Jung that followed a comment by Bob on religious fanaticism or at least intolerance. The quote by Jung seemed to be an assumption that that was Bob’s intention. You have taken the whole discussion down a path I never even considered and is totally irrelevant to my intentions. I was not and am not calling abortion rights advocates fanatics if that is what you think.
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Bob-
Various prominent people of faith have said, it doesn’t matter if God exists or not, we need him. Alcoholics Anonymous uses the higher power concept for good.
Instead of the left, Republicans and conservative church leaders, make necessary the prism of doubt about or, disdain for religion so that theocracy doesn’t replace democracy.
Lack of respect and denial of credence for a politicized tome that subjugates women, vilifies gay people and demands segregation of races only becomes mandatory when legislation and policy is enacted to make it the rule of the land.
Thanks for reading my comment and writing what you write.
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The tragedy of all of this is that claiming the fetus as a religious principle has no contextual relevance. Abortion is never mentioned in the Bible despite the fact that the practice has existed for millennia. The only place it is referenced at all is through a justification of trial by ordeal for unfaithful wives, which in itself is morally problematic, in the book of Numbers. Many evangelical Christians prior to Roe v. Wade were “pro-choice” advocates. Much of the controversy rose from the same political element that was unable to keep America segregated. This is all about hate of the other. This is the ongoing disavowal of Jesus’ second great commandment to love one another as your self. If only the same energy was focused on that pronouncement.
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Alito’s opinion, if it has four more signatures, won’t end abortions. It will end safe abortions.
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“Evangelical Christians” were pro-choice. How long have the state Catholic Conferences, the political arm of the bishops, been politicking for Americans to lose the right to reproductive decisions?
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Speduktr. I am not in the least offended.
You ask, “Does that go for atheists, too?” I really think that it does. I used to be a member of a Humanist group that held weekly meetings, but I finally stopped attending because I found so many of them to be as absolutist as the religious folks are–as tied to unprovable and doubtful assertions like materialist Laplacean determinism. My judgment: many of them were practitioners of Scientism, just another religion, but a nontheistic one. Scientism is not science. There is a place for speculation about ultimate matters. That’s what metaphysics is all about. But the point is that one must begin by recognizing that this IS speculation.
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The College Republicans and Catholic Campus Ministry clubs hosted (Nov. 10 2021) Trent Horn (converted to Catholicism) for an anti-abortion presentation at Drew College. The President of the Republicans Club which is located in New Jersey is also the co-president of the Catholic club.
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The drug cartels have to be loving the Alito decision. A whole new line of business for them.
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The illegal drug cartels
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Most of the opposition to abortion comes from fundamentalist and evangelical Christians who believe that a full-fledged human being is created at the instant of conception. In short — it is a religious BELIEF, something that cannot be recognized by government under our Constitution. Moreover, the belief that a fetus is a human person, complete with a soul, is a Christian misinterpretation of the Jewish Bible, that is, the Old Testament. But, Jewish scholars whose ancestors wrote the Old Testament and who know best what the words mean say that is a wrong interpretation of their writings.
Christians largely base their view that a fetus is a complete human being and that abortion is murder on the Jewish Bible’s Psalm 139: “You knit me together in my mother’s womb…You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born.”
Jewish scholars point out that Psalm 139 merely describes the development of a fetus and does not mean that the fetus has a soul and is a person. In fact, the Jewish Talmud explains that for the first 40 days of a woman’s pregnancy, the fetus is considered “mere fluid” and is just part of the mother’s body, like an appendix or liver. Only after the fetus’s head emerges from the womb at birth is the baby considered a “nefesh” – Hebrew for “soul” or “spirit” – a human person.
So, the majority of Jewish people favor fundamental rights regarding abortion, with some sensible caveats.
Moreover, there are Christian denominations that also allow for abortion in many instances; these denominations include the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church USA. The United Methodist Church and Episcopal churches allow abortion in cases of medical necessity. and the United Universalist Association also allows abortion.
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Frank Schaeffer on Amanpour explains assumptions that you’ve made about anti-abortion and Christian fundamentalists are wrong.
The Catholic Church appreciates the protection it receives from you which enables its state Catholic Conferences to advance anti-abortion legislation under the radar.
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Long, long, crazy, hilarious, frustrating day yesterday. I’m still catching up with Thursday and I’m already a bit late for, well, right now.
I had to bookmark this one.
Is it me or is the world really accelerating? Like out of the pandemic inertia. And, there’s a ton of bad crap speeding up too, coming right at our faces?
Two years ago I was sitting here wondering, hey, maybe something might change for the better after we pull out of COVID.
Now, we’re speeding…..BACKWARDS!
Thanks as always for helping put this mess in some sort of context.
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