> Also, is it not the case that most Americans support some abortion rights? Thus, this could force conservatives to move center on the abortion spectrum in order to appease their constituents.
One would hope, but they have only been veering further to the right on this issue. In the past year, multiple states have passed the most extreme abortion laws this country has seen over half a century. Texas will literally throw women in jail if they are caught leaving the state to get an abortion.
But those evil Democrats want to teach kids that there is nothing wrong with being gay, so I guess it equals out?
I do not know how any sane person can still support the GOP, especially after the Jan. 6 insurrection and this SC ruling.
> Also, is it not the case that most Americans support some abortion rights? Thus, this could force conservatives to move center on the abortion spectrum in order to appease their constituents.
13 states have trigger laws going into effect with this. It’s not going to move the needle at all. The red states will ban it. Blue won’t. And it’ll still be a hot button topic in the reversed states. Red candidates in blue states will want to outlaw it. Blue candidates in red states will want to allow it.
> I am not from US so can someone explain why the antiabortion thing seem rise in this last year?
There has been a shift in the Supreme Court with the appointments under Trump, particularly the replacement of Justice Kennedy, widely regarded as having been the “swing” vote on the issue, which makes it widely perceived to be more likely that existing precedent sharply limiting permissible government restrictions on abortion would be struck down, should a case involving the issue reach the Supreme Court.
Consequently, many state legislatures that are dominated by the faction opposed to abortion are implementing sharp restrictions on abortion in state law in an effort to get sued over them, get the case to the Supreme Court, and have the existing abortion rights regime abolished.
There's some more, but that's the single biggest factor.
>Look at abortion for example, do right wing evangelicals value this issue less than their support for a 10-thousand+-kilometer-away country? did they manage to make it controversial and costly to not adopt their position on it?
Being anti-abortion is a political litmus test in many parts of the US.
> Overall its just a slippery slop when you give the government this right. What happens if conservatives get in power and decided abortion should be banned outright as they consider a fetus a person? By the same logic you are using, they would be perfectly reasonable to do that.
This is a ridiculous argument and I'd say mostly FUD. Abortion is pretty well litigated. Conservatives have been in power in state and national govts for years and they've barely managed to get anywhere close to this.
>remember that the abortion issue, as a matter of law, is about the state's interests in the body. it does not litigate religious or social mores, but most of the "debate" is of this latter type.
It seems specious to claim this when the states' interests in the body in this regard (as well as gay marriage and any other rights formerly predicated on the right to privacy asserted in Roe) are based on conservative Christian beliefs and mores.
> Pence just asked for federal legislation banning all abortions. So I think you are wrong to say the Republicans are trying to return it to the states, thy are trying to ban it.
It’s worth mentioning that the constitutionality of such a law seems highly questionable based on the current leanings of SCOTUS. States’ rights work both ways, and (not a lawyer) I would assume an incredibly broad interpretation of interstate commerce would be needed to hold up a federal ban on abortions.
>> I'm tired of having the minority religious and bigoted views dominate politics and starve us of progress.
Is it minority views? Surely, when it comes down to states legislating this, people can make their opinion heard at the ballet box. And if a majority of people in a state vote conservative and abortion is restricted then we are legislating based on the wants of the majority. It will be interesting to see if this is an important enough issue for some conservative voters to swing them (and states) to the democrats.
> This law was established in my childhood, and as a nominal conservative I support it.
The trouble, there, is that the modern American mainstream right (and to a large extent the right, or at least the far-right, in most developed countries), _is not conservative_; in general it's far more radical, and wants to make far more sweeping changes, than the mainstream left.
There was a fairly long period when the political right heavily overlapped with 'conservatives', that is people who are perhaps overly into Chesterton's fence, but that's largely over now.
> leading to an alien landscape where people are fleeing newly antiabortion states and refusing job offers on the basis of what laws they have to live under.
I would note that that people having to be conscious of repressive state laws isn't _all that alien_; ethnic minorities in the US have moved states based on the laws they'd be living under for literal centuries, and LGBT people have similar concerns (it wasn't even legal to be gay nationwide in the US until 2007, for instance). The difference here is the abrupt _removal_ of pre-existing rights, of course.
> You’re assuming the rest of the country shares your views. A large portion of America views abortion as murder.
Is this backed up by data or your personal view? Because every piece of data that I've seen is that only ~30% of americans support a ban of abortion, while the large majority are in favor for it being legal.
> Eliminating federal protections for abortions annoys the left without hurting the right
I have to assume you mean emotionally, not physically. Conservatives have women in their lives who will suffer and die from legal interference in the process of pregnancy and childbirth also.
> The abortion changes don’t seem to have been major enough for me to easily find (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States), but I’ve definitely become a lot less confident in my initial opinion that it’s nearly-universally better to be a white liberal teen girl today, so thank you for the interesting conversation.
Prior to the Texas private-enforcement-only hack that occurred just before Dobbs (and was huge news before Dobbs eclipsed it), most of them were either funding/access restrictions that didn’t directly target the Constitutional right just made it difficult to exercise in practice (because that had some chance of surviving the courts), while the rest were struck down (or enjoined, and then struck down later) before going into effect and never enforced, serving primarily as strong social messaging rather than enforced law.
No, you're confused. The US has the Establishment Clause (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause) and the Free Exercise Clause, and they don't preclude religious people from using a religious basis to choose between secular policies. Abortion regulation is a secular policy area.
> The extremism involved in total or nonsensical abortion bans by various states, like even in cases of...
IIRC, most of those bans were passed when they had no hope of being enforced because of Roe v. Wade (e.g. they were for show). Now that case has been repealed, as things shake out, I expect many of those laws will be revised.
>the US will lose a basic right that practically all the rest of western world guarantees its citizens?
This isn't true. The US is somewhat of an outlier in how liberal the abortion laws are here. What's likely is that, should SCOTUS not bow to the inevitable mob that will come after this leak, blue states keep their liberal abortion laws and red states don't. Most of the country will probably have abortion laws that look pretty similar to those of e.g. Germany.
I don't see an issue; this is Federalism and it's by design.
> I doubt that this was a benevolent step ensuing that Roe is replaced by something more real.
It has nothing to do with "benevolence," but Roe being uniquely vulnerable in that its shortcomings as a legal decision made it a target even for the quarter of the GOP that disagrees with the party line on abortion.
> This is not the pattern we are seeing, or else explain the other religion-related decisions.
The explanation is that the Establishment Clause precedent is the next weakest after Roe. The U.S. was founded on religious pluralism, not French-style secularism. The absence of religious belief is, from the Constitutional perspective is not "neutral" but instead just another belief system. Excluding religious organizations and schools from public funding is plainly unconstitutional.
This is neither controversial in the US (a country where 2/3 of people disagree with the Supreme Court decision banning school prayer), or most other countries. Religious schools can get public funding in Sweden. Why not the US?
> More importantly Roe was universally accepted as real.
Our supreme court overturned a law that enshrined country-wide access to abortion. I personally disagree with this, but the phrasing as stated here isn’t representative of the truth. Individuals in progressive states and those willing to cross state lines in many cases still retain access to abortion.
There is no Federal law governing abortion. State law governs abortions, subject to Roe v. Wade and subsequent cases that provide a Constitutional right to abortion within certain parameters that the States cannot abrogate.
The Supreme Court is already considering a Mississippi abortion law case (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, nr. 19-1392) that, depending on the outcome, could significantly curtail this right, possibly lowering the deadline to 15 weeks. The decision is expected in June.
> There is a zero percentage chance the Supreme Court re-hears the [Texas] case on abortion.
If they do, will you come back and admit you were wrong?
> We all know they’re coming after gay marriage next.
Fortunately I think that will be harder to overturn, because it's on a less-shaky legal basis (as far as I know) compared to Roe v Wade. Also I think that ship has more or less sailed and society has basically come to accept it. Abortion has always been a lot more contentious.
> I never thought I’d have to use the term ‘Christian extremists’, but what they’re doing to basic human rights is disturbing.
This has been decades in the making, the endgame of an intergenerational propaganda campaign. They were extremists in the 80s, in the 00s, and today. What's interesting now is that the "Christian" angle is de-emphasized, and what used to be considered Christian fundamentalism has worked its way into mainstream secular conservativism (not by accident).
It is arguably a longstanding American political tradition to govern according to hypocritical authoritarian religious extremist principles, dating back to literally before the founding of the USA.
> Why is it so hard for you to believe that Republicans are against contraception?
Because I try very, very hard not to believe things without evidence, and I haven't seen any evidence yet. From my sibling comment on this law, this bill would have guaranteed the right to an abortion because the way they define contraceptive includes abortion. This then seems like evidence that Conservatives love the idea of restricting abortion (which they absolutely do). It is a fallacy of composition to say they favor restricting contraceptives. If you do that, you may as well broaden the category more and say they love restricting health care, or that they love to restrict free market transactions, though such is clearly not warranted because generally speaking conservatives hate the idea of restricting free market transactions (unless they're jailing people simply for ingesting plants (an allusion to the war on drugs, which they definitely seem to love, but I digress)).
I'm not American so i might be mistaken, but can the recent changes in abortion laws across a section of US states be explained in any other way?
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