Let the Decision Stand

[BoSoxGal]

From my former constitutional law professor at Georgetown (our class was actually titled ‘Democracy & Coercion,’ part of GULC’s alternative curriculum for 1L students):

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/1 ... ade-stand/

[Scooter]

For me it's pretty simple. It has nothing to do with when life begins or whether a fetus has a right to life. The issue comes down to the question of whether a pregnant woman is a slave or a free agent. If we force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term, then we have made her a slave in service of the being inside her. And slavery was supposed to have been abolished for all human beings by the 13th Amendment.

That is, of course, if one believes that women are fully fledged human beings. Perhaps some do not...

[Big RR]

But Scooter, the law often subverts the interests of the parents (male and female) to the interests of their offspring--one can be prosecuted criminally for neglect and legally forced to care for and support your children, even if you do not want to (there are ways to get out of this, but, again, the courts are required to balance the interests). What the court in Roe did was balance the interests of the preborn human and the mother, and used viability outside of the uterus as the cutoff point for abortion except in certain circumstances. While you may liken it to slavery, it does make sense in the context of our society. Not a perfect bright line, but it does make sense.

[BoSoxGal]

Nobody should ever be forced into parenting a child they don’t want. Nobody should ever be forced to bring a terminally ill grossly disfigured or malformed fetus to full term only to watch it die an agonizing death - even if doctors don’t figure out the anomaly/anomalies until 30 weeks. These arbitrary cutoffs based on viability are all total bullshit. Abortion without limits - a healthcare decision between a woman and her physician of choice and nobody else. A baby has rights when it emerges from the birth canal or is taken from the uterus via Caesarian section, and not before. All of this is about controlling women’s lives these people don’t care about ‘life’ anymore the moment a baby is out of the womb - fucking hypocrites.

[Big RR]

BSG--while I wouldn't argue with your healthcare decision suggestion, I do think that it could provoke a backlash in the country and get a Constitutiona amendment banning abortion passed. Certainly it would be a good solution, but politics is the art of the possible.

As for people being forced to parent, are you honestly saying children have no right to demand anything of their parents? I think they do, and I have seen far too many selfish parents that just ignore their obligations to the detriment of the children. At the very least they should be required to provide financial support, but IMHO, they should be obligated to do more. There are many times where someone is incapable of doing this and should be excused, but many other times when they should live up to their responsibility. Children are not something that could (or should) be blithely cast aside.

However, the latter is a different subject; if people want to discuss it, we should open a different thread.

[BoSoxGal]

Yes BigRR what I determined from all my years as a DV advocate and CASA volunteer and attorney for children and parents and the state in dependency/neglect cases is that children have no rights. And that’s what my post above says.

[Big RR]

Maybe I misunderstood your statement "Nobody should ever be forced into parenting a child they don’t want.", I don't know; but not wanting your child (at least after it is born) is not sufficient to remove the parental responsibility IMHO.

And children do have some rights--my years as a Law Guardian showed me that. They should have more, but I would never want a system where children have no rights. Perhaps it varies from state to state.

But I do not want to derail this thread, so I will eed my participation in this discussion.

[Scooter]

But Scooter, the law often subverts the interests of the parents (male and female) to the interests of their offspring--one can be prosecuted criminally for neglect and legally forced to care for and support your children, even if you do not want to

A parent cannot be forced, for example, to donate the blood or organ or whatever other tissue might be necessary to save the life of their already born child, so it should follow that a woman cannot be forced to use her body to support the life of a fetus.

What the court in Roe did was balance the interests of the preborn human and the mother, and used viability outside of the uterus as the cutoff point for abortion except in certain circumstances.

No woman who has carried a baby for 22 or 24 weeks is suddenly going to wake up one morning and decide to have an abortion, not unless there is some danger to her health or to the health of her baby. This notion that women would be aborting viable 8.99 month old fetuses for no reason in the absence of a criminal law prohibiting it, is complete bullshit. If a woman were going to have an abortion, she would have decided long before then (unless of course, laws restricting abortion had created a barrier to access).

In Canada there has been no legal prohibition on abortion since 1988, when those Criminal Code provisions were struck down and Parliament was unable to agree to enact a replacement. And yet there are only a handful of facilities in the entire country (all in the largest four provinces) that have the capability to perform an abortion after 24 weeks, because the lack of demand does not afford the opportunity to learn how to perform those procedures. Plus, medical ethical rules place limits on when viable fetuses can be aborted. Just as no doctor requires the criminal law to tell them that it is wrong to amputate a healthy limb if a patient asks for it, no doctor is going to terminate a viable fetus without good reason. And to paraphrase Pete Buttigieg, who gave an excellent answer on this issue, inserting criminal law into that decision making process is not going to improve it.

[BoSoxGal]

Maybe I misunderstood your statement "Nobody should ever be forced into parenting a child they don’t want.", I don't know; but not wanting your child (at least after it is born) is not sufficient to remove the parental responsibility IMHO.

And children do have some rights--my years as a Law Guardian showed me that. They should have more, but I would never want a system where children have no rights. Perhaps it varies from state to state.

But I do not want to derail this thread, so I will eed my participation in this discussion.

There is no need to end your participation, but maybe let’s discuss the issue at hand - the right to abortion.

And while I very obviously believe children have rights since I have dedicated years of my work to that proposition - and the best interests of the child calculus is pretty universal nationwide in family law courts - I don’t fool myself into believing that children have any right to force a biological parent to parent them, well or otherwise.

Of course children have a legal right to basic material support from biological parents in the absence of a termination of parental rights, we are both lawyers who have worked in the family court so we know this basic rule. Same that children have a right not to be abused or neglected by those who have custody of them; but in reality that right is very rarely effectively enforced by the state.

They certainly don’t really have a fundamental right to parenting - if that were true, the whole sick system of the nuclear family would be thrown into upheaval and the world would fall to chaos. However could we continue to exist as a species if all parents were actually expected to parent well as a prerequisite to being given the gift of a child?!

Children always have been and likely always will be the scapegoats for their parents’ toxic crap, and most parents have some - if the parents are poor, the state actually steps in, but in the real world lots of middle income and high income families are abusing and neglecting their children in myriad ways and getting away with it. That’s why the world is so full of fucked up hurt people who hurt other people.

[Big RR]

I can't argue with what you have said, and agree re abortion, although I do not think unrestricted abortion on demand will ever be the law in this country, and relly don't want a Constitutional amendment banning abortion (I'd like to think that couldn't happen, but I'm not so sure--there are plenty of people, men and women, who would support it).

[Bicycle Bill]

-"BB"-

[Jarlaxle]

Time for cash payouts for sterilization...and probably contraceptives in the water supply.