A month ago, governmental violations of bodily autonomy were ignored, or grumbled about at most. If you want me to believe that this change is qualitatively different, you need to explain that, or else I'm going to put both violations in the same bucket.

> no state nor the Federal government has even hinted at the idea of a universal vaccination requirement for COVID-19

First, regardless of what they've actually tried to do, there has been a lot of talk about how they should. Such talk comes pretty much exclusively from the same group of people who think that overturning Roe is an apocalypse.

Second, they most certainly have tried to force vaccination as much as they could get away with. That wasn't by a law saying "get vaccinated or go to jail". That was a backdoor coercive thing where the gov't tried to say "if you want to do business with the gov't then all your employees must be vaccinated (leading to employees getting fired)", in conjunction with the fact that the government is already so damned big that they can be the 800lb gorilla in purchasing as a backdoor alternative to legislation. And while this was going on, people who I'm very sure support Roe were nodding their heads saying it's the right thing to do. Again, there may be a principled argument for treating this differently. But I think it's incumbent on the Roe protesters to explain what that principle is, or they appear to be unprincipled hypocrites.

Specifically avoided saying that. Stated simply, my point is there is positive precedent to the precursors to vaccine mandates, and reasonable ambiguity to the question per se. There is clear negative precedent for abortion. As such, comparing them is misleading. (Better analogy may be found in gun rights.)

Yeah. The rhetoric on this is so overheated that I'm convinced that some people actually believe Roe v. Wade is the Third Amendment [1] or something like that. IHMO, this debate would be a lot better if people could distinguish between policy and the law/legal reasoning as separate things.

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-3/

No one ever said that... and apparently you've entirely missed the ProChoice argument. Does a government have the right to prevent you from having an appendectomy? Where does the government end and you begin? ProChoice is about limiting absolute government authority, like, over your cells and junk.

btw the rights in question are already in the Constitution. We generally refer to it as the Fourth Amendment, though an explicit line limiting what the government can do also lives in the Third Amendment. With the 3rd and the 4th Amendments, any ban on abortion is necessarily unconstitutional, in that we have a right to be secure in our persons free from government intrusion, and the government can't force anyone to take on a tenant, even if for only 9 months.

You’ve got it backwards. States have a general “police power” and have the right to pass laws to regulate the public health unless it infringes on a federal constitutional right. In 50 years there has never been a “great legal argument” where the right to have medical providers perform abortion appears in the Constitution. You’re welcome to look in there yourself and report back.

The Supreme Court ruling on the Constitutionality of laws isn’t in the Constitution.

You’re describing a judicial philosophy (textualism) as if it were law, or some sacred edict from above. It’s not.

You’re pretending the “democratic process” isn’t broken. It is.

Remember: the legislature could have banned abortion outright, at any time. We didn’t need the courts to do that. It would just take an amendment to the Constitution.

Remember: a majority of people in the US want abortion to be legal. The court overruled that based on its own fetish for textualism.

It’s great that you want people to talk to each other. In the mean time, women will die.

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.

It was kind of the other way around. There is clearly no explicit right to abortion in the constitution, so to find one it would have to be implicit, but the Court in Roe wanted to find one, so they made one up. The reasoning was something like, the constitution implies there is a general right to privacy and laws against abortion violate it. The people who liked the result were then stuck trying to defend its inconsistent reasoning for 50 years, because the same logic would cause all kinds of other laws to be a violation of the same right. Obvious example would be drug prohibition; government invading your privacy by trying to control what you put into your own body. Same logic as Roe.

But Roe was never actually extended to any of that stuff, so overturning it didn't re-enable drug prohibition after it was struck down, since it was (inconsistently) never struck down to begin with.

The cases having to do with anonymous speech are independent and use entirely different logic. The general idea is that people are deterred from speaking (chilling effects) if people can associate what they have to say with a physical person who can then be harassed for expressing an unpopular opinion. It doesn't have any of the same problems because there is no First Amendment right to morphine, which they could ban outright under the same justification as they ban heroin, so having to show your ID to get morphine isn't deterring you from exercising your right to free speech.

This is exactly how rights work, how they're debated and how the supreme court rules. Like the constitution says you have freedom of speech, but you don't have an absolute right to freedom of speech. You cannot go on someone else's property and start yelling because they have the right to kick you off, violating your right to freedom of speech.

What you're trying to do is frame it in a way that makes sense to yourself, which is great, but is not how things are decided by the judiciary. Which is my entire point: It doesn't matter if you explicitly say bodily autonomy is sacred in a constitutional amendment because ultimately the supreme court is whom interprets that. The only way you could in theory do something like this would be to have an amendment that outright says abortion is legal, but that wouldn't pass for obvious reasons.

You really need to go and try to debate more pro-life individuals because these are all things I've encountered while debating them. The idea that this line of thinking is 'too much' when that's literally what's happening in places like my current state of Texas means you really need to experience what's actually going on.

I think Roe was a good compromise affording choice to the mother up to a point while protecting the unborn later. Again why do you fixate on conception, what turns cells merging and replicating into a person and why is it at the point when the sperm and egg merge, not before and not sometime after? Why did you choose that line to take your stand?

>Roe wasn't a law, it was a legal precedent dehumanizing a class of people for another class's benefit. Now we do have actual laws that are made by legislatures across the country to try to do justice to a complicated subject as you admit it is.

Decisions made by the Supreme Court are law regardless of whether you like them or not, specifically case law. Trying to act like it wasn't a real law is a petty argument, it obviously was until overturned. I am skeptical you believe this should be left to the states since because if you truly believe this murder why would you be ok with letting some state allow it. You seem to think this is very simple reducing a person down to a zygote but not a sperm and egg in a very black and white manner.

>I think people should have access to contraceptives, I'm not sure it's guaranteed by the constitution though.

The constitution does not guarantee the right to assault rifles specifically, are you ok with leaving that decision up to the states? Arms is a very open ended term as is the right to privacy this must be interpreted by the court to have specific meaning, currently allowing assault rifles but not nuclear arms and contraception but wire tapping is allowed with a warrant.

>Apparently He preferred beings capable of deciding to follow Him of their own free will rather than automatons.

The distinction between free will and automatons has no meaning to a being that creates everything including free will itself. To have true free will not predetermined by god would require outside input, it would require a source of entropy that was not created by god. The only way god could not control our actions is if there is uncertainty from some other source otherwise we are doing exactly as we where designed. Either the universe is deterministic as god designed or is non-deterministic due to outside input, simple logic.

>What's more impressive though? Designing a program that can choose between multiple options and determine its fate or designing a program completely constrained to make the choices I orchestrate? And yet, we would be comfortable saying a programmer would be totally justified if they shut down or even deleted a program erring as you've described!

This still make no logical sense, did god create everything including all choices possible or not? God created the constraints unless you believe there is something beyond god a greater universe created by whom?

If a programmer creates a sentient AI that makes its own choices I guarantee it will be getting input not created by the programmer that helps form and drive its choices. A programmer is not god and did not create everything, and if he did I would hope he would not be so stupid as to blame his own program for bad choices based on input he created!

Forcing care workers to take a medicine against their will is constitutional you say?

All medical procedures should be voluntary, or we go back to the times of lobotomy and forced sterilizations of minorities (and that's not as many decades back as you may think).

> Government can and has jailed and/or fined people for not getting a vaccine.

This means being unvaxed is a something only the rich can afford. Pay fines, and have a good lawyer.

We've had mandatory vaccinations for over a century, certainly since Roe V. Wade, and yet abortion is still legal.

Half the US believes abortion is murder and a sin against God and yet as far as I know, never has anyone tried to use the existence of vaccination laws as a pretext for making abortion illegal. That wouldn't even make sense.

That's exactly the point; and those "oh so many things" are left to the States.

> Perhaps a constitutional amendment that gives people their privacy back is in order?

Perhaps, I'd be supportive of something like that!

> "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

This just means that the absence of an enumerated right doesn't imply that the right is absent by default. The fact that the Constitution doesn't outline a right to drive a car (or consume heroin) doesn't mean that driving a car or consuming heroin is by default illegal; it's just left to the States (and the people) to decide what to do with those things. But (importantly), just because the Constitution doesn't outline a right to consume heroin, the 9th Amendment does not confer a Constitutional right to consume heroin — that would be absurd. It's still something that can be decided upon by the legislatures, and if a legislature decided to outlaw the consumption of heroin, you can't point to the Constitution to invalidate such laws.

> It stands to reason (in Roe) that, unless someone's religion (separation of church and state?) believes a life begins before birth, the right of a woman's privacy and control of her own life and happiness is primary.

I agree with the normative assessment that the right of a woman's privacy and control of her own life/happiness is primary (at least up to a certain point in the pregnancy); I'm pro-choice. That said, the fact that people may use their own religious views to come to a different conclusion and pass laws to that effect is NOT a violation of the separation of church and state. All "separation of church and state" means is that there's no official state religion, and policymaking isn't delegated to the clergy without democratic input — that's it.

To illustrate with an example, it doesn't really matter that (historically) the majority of people derived their beliefs on the morality of assault/murder from the Ten Commandments, the fact that murder is illegal is not a violation of the separation of church and state.

> Any other logic, as in Dobbs, is superseding her right to privacy, life, and happiness, with the religious belief in the life of an unborn child.

Except this belief is not exclusively religious. There are plenty of atheists that are pro-life, and similarly believe that (at least after a certain point of a pregnancy) the right of the unborn child should be balanced with the right of the mother.

I'm sorry, you have to read the first 11 words of the Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons

> Which says: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner.” I’m at a loss. You understand the Constitution is a legal document, right? Not a sequence of metaphors and allegories? Is a fetus a “soldier?” No? Then the Third Amendment is irrelevant.

I said the spirit of a right of abortion lives in this amendment. If the government bans abortions, this is precisely the same thing as effectively nationalizing fetuses and quartering them in bodies, yes, but also in houses, as those bodies live in houses. The point is consent... if a woman does not consent to a pregnancy...

You really have to try very very hard not to see it. Well done.

Because it’s often both overreaching, ineffective, and/or harmful to unrelated things. See: the war on drugs, gay marriage until the last decade, etc, etc.

The more you do at the federal level, the more fallout it’s going to have and the harder it’s going to be to fix.

> and one particular party has let it be known they’re open for business in that respect.

This is a strawman to help delegitimize people who are against particular regulations for philosophical reasons. I don’t recommend repeating it if you want actual discussions. It’s like claiming most of the pro-choice movement is driven by the abortion industry.

Codifying Roe v. Wade only makes sense as a symbolic act of protest against a court ruling against it when you lack the votes to do anything meaningful. Preemptively, it makes no sense, since a court that would reject the right held to exist in Roe as a 14th Amendment right is also sure to rule that no power granted to Congress allows it to curtail the powers reserved to states by codifying Roe.

It wasn't, not really. And this is exactly my point:

Most countries have successfully legislated abortion law. The USA's federal legislature failed to do so directly and left it to their supreme court to decide something from their ambiguity: as is their job.

This decision can still today be written clearly into law, in either direction, by representatives. So, it's an ongoing failure of the legislature.

This is false, Roe doesn't have “no basis in the Constitutional text”. It is true that the derivation of the understanding of rights articulated in Roe from the text is indirect, but that does not make it absent; it is a judicial understanding built on prior judicial understandings each of which directly or via even more intermediary judicial understandings derive from the text.

> What’s the source of the court’s authority in that context?

“The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority”

> Missouri just banned abortion as a result of this being overturned, so yes, it does.

No, it doesn't, Missouri's laws have prohibited abortion.

> If I convince 51% of the populace geminis are evil and should be imprisoned, this is not a sufficient condition for the government to implement this policy. We would need to scientifically demonstrate that astrology is in fact true.

Government is not bound by what is scientifically demonstrated, thus making this statement and the rest of what you wrote, incorrect.

> A characteristic of a free society is not one where the government creates laws based on the whims of particular religious groups.

Hundreds, if not thousands of years of fairly consistent belief that life is sacred is hardly a whim, neither is the opposition to Roe v Wade from certain religious groups. It's also not characteristic of free society, governments put in place plenty of silly laws "on a whim" in free societies.