As relayed to me and posted by shimmeringjemmy
The US Supreme Court upheld a ban on later term abortions that do not take into account the health of the mother.
Personally, I see this as yet another step in law creation that is designed to protect the lawmaker over the people.
In the past year I have seen the following rights of the individual taken away:
rights to put money into playing poker online
rights to carry arms on a college campus to defend oneself
rights to have a medical operation than may be necessary to save oneself
It is far more important for the US bipartisan system to make a daily effort to polarize its inhabitants into abject apathy so that the control of government is firmly removed from its citizens hands.
The principle of popular election is a fatal folly; its results are visible in every so-called democracy. The elected man is always the mediocrity; he is the safe man, the sound man, the man who displeases the majority less than any other; and therefore never the genius, the man of progress and illumination. – Liber 194 – 10.
The average american (sic) no longer votes about issues they care about. They vote about polarized words they’ve been taught to take sides on.
Why does government even try to legislate school prayer when the actions of one person’s religious beliefs should be untouchable by government? Why legislate the question of the life of the unborn child when the religious leaders of the world can’t agree on the answer.
A government that has to legislate to protect against the expression of the destruction of its symbolic equivalent is a government that acknowledges that they are failing. Translation without big words: If you have to take away the first amendment rights of free speech to prevent people from burning the flag… you admit that people are losing faith in what the flag symbolizes.
Freedom, independence, liberty refer to an absence of undue restrictions and an opportunity to exercise one’s rights and powers. Freedom emphasizes the opportunity given for the exercise of one’s rights, powers, desires, or the like: freedom of speech or conscience; freedom of movement.
Personally, when the government makes laws that affect what I do with my life… when the government makes laws that turn personal activities criminal… I for one, don’t feel a brimming sensation of freedom.
When it is outlawed, only criminals will profit.
You are so funny. I am commenting without reading (I have already heard), just to say that you are the only person who still puts in the ‘ in ‘Chite, and I appreciate that you remember 🙂
More and more, people are ignoring the “rules” and doing what they damned well please, and then letting the lawyers sort it out later. Since corporations have been doing so for years, they figure, why can’t we?
Actually the SCOTUS ruling was against partial-birth abortions, not against late term abortions. (source) There is a difference between the two: in a late-term abortion, the mother receives an abortion in the third semester (last three months) of the birth. The “right” to a third-semester abortion was never affirmed in Roe v Wade; states since Roe v Wade can pass laws prohibiting late term abortions and have always been able to.
A partial birth abortion, which is what SCOTUS ruled against, is an abortion where the baby is partially born–and after the head emerges from the birth canal but before the rest of the body emerges, a needle is inserted into the back of the neck and the brain is sucked out of the skull. The reason why this procedure is controversial should be pretty obvious: had the mother pushed or the needle gotten inserted about two seconds later when the entire body emerges from the mother, this would be murder, not abortion. (The baby is technically considered a human being once it is outside of the body of the mother; a partial birth abortion uses the gray fuzzy arena about a baby being ‘partially born’; that is, with part of the body still inside, but part outside, the birth canal.)
The rational in Roe v Wade against late-term abortions unless medically necessary (that is, unless there is a ‘drowning pair’ situation where one or the other will die anyway) is that a fetus in the third semester can be kept alive on life support outside of the body of the mother. Thus, technically the fetus could be considered ‘alive’. What makes a partial birth abortion abhorrant to many people is that the baby is being born when it is killed: there is no conceivable emergency situation that could ever possibly arise where, after being partially born, an infant would then have to be killed in order to preserve the life of the mother. Once the infant is partially born, it’s just a matter of reaching in and pulling the infant out; killing the infant and removing the pieces afterwards is medically more complex than just giving it a good tug.
Now of course with that said some freak emergency will come up where a partially born infant will need to be killed to save the mother’s life. But I sort of doubt it.
While this sort of digresses from my post…
I guess the concern here becomes
In that freakishly rare case, where it is deemed medically necessary to save the mother’s life at the cost of her child… Should this decision be left in the hands of the medical professional or in the hands of 9 supposedly non-partsan lawyers with often minimal medical training. (Yes, I know there is the occassional lawyer with a medical background)
In this case, the doctor now faces a potential malpractice suit when a patient dies because his hands were legally tied from potentially saving her.
Re: While this sort of digresses from my post…
The funny of it is that SCOTUS was asked to rule on the power of Congress to pass a law banning partial-birth abortions, not on the legality of the law itself. Clearly in this case, given precedent of Roe v. Wade, Congress did have the power to pass the law in question.
Because the SCOTUS was limited to a question on the power of Congress, and not on the nature of the law itself, they were unable to rule on the constitutionality of a proviso allowing doctors to perform a partial birth abortion in the freakish off-chance that such a partial birth abortion would be medically necessary–that is, necessitated by either doing the partial birth abortion, or having both the mother and infant die.
(That, by the way, is the ‘drowning pair’ exception: that a doctor has the ability to do something that would be otherwise illegal only if, by not performing the operation that kills one patient, both patients will die. I state this for clarity–given that in the debate, some have interpreted the ‘drowning pair’ exception as including the emotional well-being of the mother, which is not the case here.)
rights to carry arms on a college campus to defend oneself
sorry to ignore the rest of your post, but concealed carry on a college campus won’t help unless gun ownership comes with reasonably extensive safety and use training. using a gun in a panic situation is HARD, and having a bunch of people running around with arms who don’t really know how to use them is a lot more dangerous than trying to make sure no one is armed. statistically, if you own a gun, its most likely use in harming another human being is not you protecting yourself in an armed conflict (because these are actually fairly rare, if you look at frequency per year per millions of americans — these mass shootings get a lot of publicity but they’re nothing to the thousands of gun-related accidents that occur every year), but your kid finding it and setting it off.
personally, i feel my liberty as an individual is better protected by putting guns in the hands of fewer incompetent people. let’s not get confused that freedom is only freedom to do things; it’s also freedom from having nasty shit inflicted on you.
also, i am really pissed at the reagan administration for cutting public funding for the treatment and institutionalization of the mentally ill. i’ve been reading today about professors on college campuses and how most of the time, people see the ticking time bomb a mile away, but there’s no clear legal course of action to do anything until a crime is actually committed. part of that is because there’s no longer funding to commit people who are diagnosed with severe mental illnesses and violent tendencies. if their families can’t cough up, all they can get is outpatient care. of course, then there’s the question of whether people should ever be committed against their will… again we have to ask, which is more important, the right to physical freedom of someone who fits the psychological profile of a potential serial killer, or my right not to get shot on my own goddamn campus? (and actually, i don’t think there’s a clear-cut answer to this — just pointing out that other people’s freedoms infringe on mine and vice versa… so your statement that people should have the right to concealed carry, as far as i’m concerned, infringes on my right not to have to share space with armed incompetents.)