dagblog - Comments for ""Exclusive - Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows""

White and nonwhite Democrats

artappraiser — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 18:14:33 +0000

In reply to "Exclusive - Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows"

White and nonwhite Democrats are divided on abortion.

While white Democrats oppose a 15-week ban by a solid 40 point margin, nonwhite Democrats are only opposed by 8 points. pic.twitter.com/Yp58sIw9uC
— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) June 2, 2022

Gotcha, Fr. Martin:

artappraiser — Tue, 24 May 2022 12:22:22 +0000

In reply to Is there room on @NPR for pro

gotcha, Fr. Martin:

The are 6 Catholic’s on the Supreme Court. Will the #CatholicChurch now refuse them communion?
You know, ending a life.

The Supreme Court just condemned a man to die despite strong evidence he’s innocent https://t.co/H5QHtvyPm2
— Mr. Spock (Commentary) (@SpockResists) May 23, 2022

To the extent that messaging

artappraiser — Fri, 20 May 2022 02:40:57 +0000

In reply to "Exclusive - Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows"

To the extent that messaging matters, the best message is unlikely to be the one you like best — the target, after all, is a persuadable voter who probably doesn’t share your values or level of interest in politics.https://t.co/TT89lf5B9G pic.twitter.com/KRCrm8M1OQ
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 19, 2022

Abortion in the Founders’ era

artappraiser — Thu, 19 May 2022 12:53:27 +0000

In reply to "Exclusive - Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows"

Abortion in the Founders’ era: Violent, chaotic and unregulated

By Gillian Brockell @ WashingtonPost.vom, May 15, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. calls himself an originalist, someone who thinks the Constitution should be interpreted only by how it would have been understood by the Founders when they wrote it. So it’s no surprise that his draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade is full of history.

At least seven times, Alito cited Sir Matthew Hale, a 17th-century jurist who didn’t think marital rape was possible because wives were the property of their husbands, and who sentenced at least two women to die for witchcraft. Alito also cited a legal text from 1250 by Henry de Bracton that, in another section, says women are inferior to men, and that they sometimes give birth to literal monsters.

Alito confined his exploration of the past to legal history and English common law. But to assess how the Founders would view abortion rights, it’s necessary to paint a fuller picture of what abortion was actually like in the time of the Founders.

And it was very different from how it might look in a post-Roe America.

Abortion in the Revolutionary War era

In the 18th-century United States and England, abortion was common enough that there were slang terms for it, like “taking the cold,” “taking the trade” and “bringing down the flowers.” It was less-effective and more dangerous than it is now; women seeking abortions often died from infected wounds or poisons. And it was generally unregulated, except for a few instances in England and one in colonial Maryland mentioned by Alito in the draft opinion.

In the late-18th and early-19th centuries, no states had laws against any form of abortion, though Alito averred that “manuals for justices of the peace printed in the colonies in the 18th century” sometimes "repeated Hale’s and [William] Blackstone’s statements that anyone who prescribed medication ‘unlawfully to destroy the child’ would be guilty of murder if the woman died.”

In the Revolutionary War era and the decades after, most homes would have had a medical manual like William Buchan’s “Domestic Medicine” or Samuel K. Jennings’s “The Married Woman’s Best Friend,” according to James C. Mohr in “Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy.” These books included recipes for concoctions that could induce menses that had been “blocked” or “suppressed” — a common way to refer to early pregnancy. One gave advice specifically for young women who had “what you call a common cold” (emphasis in original), before listing plant extracts believed to induce abortion. Another advised that if the concoctions didn’t work, one could try “violent exercise … jumping or stepping from an eminence, strokes on the belly, [and] falls.”

CAPTION: In the late-18th century and early-19th century, many American homes would have had a copy of “Domestic Medicine” by William Buchan, pictured here. The book included instructions to eliminate “obstructed menses” — a euphemism for early pregnancy. (National Institutes of Health)

One of these plant extracts, savin, which comes from juniper bushes, was particularly effective and also plentiful in the United States. But it came with high risk; too much could be lethal to the woman. Plus, there was the issue of murder: For some men acquiring savin for a woman they had impregnated, the “problem” was still solved if the woman died. (Murder, often at the hands of a romantic partner, is still the No. 1 cause of death for pregnant people.)

Beyond the ruling classes in England and America, there is also evidence of abortion among Indigenous American peoples and the enslaved, according to John Riddle in “Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West.” Enslaved Black people likely brought this knowledge with them from Africa. A drink made of a certain type of cotton root native to Africa was used to induce abortion throughout the South.

Unlike many antiabortion activists today, most religious and legal scholars at the time did not think “ensoulment” began at the moment of conception but at the time of “quickening” — when a pregnant person can feel fetal movement, generally between 16 and 22 weeks. The vast majority of Alito’s historical references concern cases of abortion after the fetus was “quick.” He took pains to point out the few times his sources don’t mention it, but this isn’t necessarily evidence the people involved thought abortion before quickening was also wrong or a crime. Back then, a woman was simply not considered to be “carrying [a] child” before quickening, according to British historian Kate Lister.

The case of Eleanor Beare

In one of these instances, Alito introduced the English case of Eleanor Beare, writing, “In 1732, for example, Eleanor Beare was convicted of ‘destroying the Foetus in the Womb, and there-by causing her to miscarry.’ ” In the next paragraph, he wrote that “the judge said of the charge of abortion (with no mention of quickening) that he had ‘never met with a case so barbarous and unnatural.’ ”

But a read of Alito’s source for this quote, a contemporaneous trial summary in Gentleman’s Magazine, reveals that the judge was talking about more than just abortion. Beare was tried on three charges and convicted of two: giving a man poison for the express purpose of killing his wife, and ending the pregnancy of a servant who was raped in her home by inserting an iron skewer into the woman’s uterus.

But a read of Alito’s source for this quote, a contemporaneous trial summary in Gentleman’s Magazine, reveals that the judge was talking about more than just abortion. Beare was tried on three charges and convicted of two: giving a man poison for the express purpose of killing his wife, and ending the pregnancy of a servant who was raped in her home by inserting an iron skewer into the woman’s uterus.

CAPTION: Sir Matthew Hale (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

The first antiabortion law in the United States

England passed its first law officially banning post-quickening abortion in 1800. The United States didn’t follow until 1821, when the Connecticut legislature banned giving a noxious substance to a woman “quick with child.” This was in the wake of a sex scandal involving a controversial preacher and a young woman he allegedly impregnated. The pastor gave her “poison” and, when that didn’t work, inserted “a tool” inside of her. She later delivered a stillborn child.

How a sex scandal led to the nation’s first abortion law 200 years ago

Authorities wanted to jail the preacher but couldn’t find any laws on the books he had broken. In this context, said Mohr, the “Abortion in America” author, the country’s first antiabortion law should be viewed as more of a “poison-control measure.”

Lolita Buckner Inniss, dean of the University of Colorado’s law school, who has studied the case in depth, had a different take when she spoke about it with The Washington Post in 2019. She pointed out that this first law banned only medicinal abortions, not mechanical ones. Medicinal abortions were more often administered by women — “grannies and midwives, many of them immigrants and formerly enslaved women” — while the mechanical abortions, the Beare case notwithstanding, were more often the purview of men in the burgeoning medical field.

When abortion didn’t work

There’s another aspect of pregnancy and childbirth during the Founders’ time not mentioned in Alito’s draft opinion: the prevalence of infanticide. Desperate women would sometimes dump a newborn in an outhouse or otherwise secretly kill the child and destroy the body.

It is impossible to know how many women got away with this undetected, but Lister pointed out that it too was common enough to have a grotesque slang term that made it into a 1785 lexicon book. She has found numerous British trial records for women accused of killing their newborns; between 1700 and 1800, there were 134 of these cases in a single London court.

“We must remember that this is only one court, in one area and these trials are the ones that were caught,” she wrote. “The actual figures of illegitimate infanticide will never be known.”

This was the case even with the presence of foundling hospitals, where women could safely abandon babies. These homes were perpetually over capacity, to the point where mothers had to enter a lottery to win a spot at one of them. Mothers were often required to leave a token with their babies, like a colored ribbon or unique button, in case they wanted to return for them. Of more than 16,000 babies brought to one hospital between 1741 and 1760, only 152 were reclaimed.

None of this resembles abortion today, whether or not it remains legal nationally. Abortion pills are regulated and safe to use. Surgical abortions have also become safe, and the “quickening” standard has shifted to a “viability” argument. We know more than ever about fetal development, and some states have permitted later abortions for medical reasons. Child-bearing without marriage, though still stigmatized, has become less so.

This is one reason critics of originalism say the historical understanding doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, matter. The legal scholars Alito quoted lived in a world where women were property, babies could be “monsters” and abortion was dangerous.

Abortion compromise?

PeraclesPlease — Wed, 18 May 2022 04:36:13 +0000

In reply to "Exclusive - Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows"

Abortion compromise?

.@RoryLittle , Professor, very smart guy, and former clerk who knows the court well has a concrete proposal for a middle ground that Kavanaugh and even Barrett could consider:

Can 5 Justices Preserve a Woman’s Right to Choose? https://t.co/jHmW8WuiWv via @RecorderTweets
— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) May 13, 2022

My mother, a holy Catholic

artappraiser — Mon, 16 May 2022 18:18:37 +0000

In reply to Except not all pro-lifers are

My mother, a holy Catholic rosary fan when young, got real cynical about all of it real quick as she birthed more babies while always struggling for money. She often brought up how ridiculous the old tymes were when people actually used to call a priest for Last Rites over the toilet when an early miscarriage happened. Yes, plenty of fertiized eggs get flushed down the toilet every day because they fail to sufficiently adhere to the uterine wall (and that is how the 'morning after' pill works, btw, it prevents ferti'ized eggs from implanting by inducing a 'period')

edit to add: by the time of Vatican II, top down Catholicism from Rome favored "natural family planning'. My parents actually had instruction pamphlets of using the rhythm method from the church. So it wasn't anti - planning of births,, married couples were just supposed to use will power to forgo sex during fertile periods, not artificial methods. Because, the theory was, if it happened even when you were trying your darnedest that it not happen, then it's god's will. Therein is the big flaw of Paul VI's Curriculum Vitae: the church hasn't been against scientific intervention being god's will since Galileo. I.E. They very much want sick people to take antibiotics so they don't die.

So the "life begins from conception" theory is faulty at its core. It's a natural everyday ocurrence that fertilized eggs get flushed down the toilet or thrown in the trash with menstrual pads/tampons and the woman doesn't even know.

Except not all pro-lifers are

PeraclesPlease — Mon, 16 May 2022 08:27:26 +0000

In reply to He should know that - I would

Except not all pro-lifers are in good faith, and I'd say much of the shift since the 70s was to "own the libs" more than to protect or imorove life. (The cynicism with which many approach "do unto others" and "as you do to the least of my brethren you do to me" gives that away. - for many charity has become a 4 letter word unless it's thru a Falwell church donation)

But for a good some (many?) this is a real issue of murder from 1st signs of pregnancy. You can tell them how many pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriages, often without knowledge of the mother even, but similar to people not wanting to wear masks for Covid, it's hard to reason for those who have faith alone (though often along with trust in some religious-political authority)

And for some, human sex and procreation is part of where we raise ourselves above animals, so the symbolism is more than important - for people who argue for transmogrification during the mass ritual, it will be hard to talk out of, whatever Martin Luther did 100s of years ago. Still, this is part of why we separate church and state - not to abuse and insult religion, but to allow development of social/scientific principles post-Enlightenment.

He should know that - I would

artappraiser — Mon, 16 May 2022 07:12:04 +0000

In reply to It's not that tough -

He should know that - I would be surprised if he didn't - the "quickening" when a "soul" enters a fetus was pretty much standard folk tradition for millennia, at the end of the first trimester. No popes nor electronic scans needed to figure that out and everyone pretty much followed the implications of that in law and morality. (i.e., someone kills a heavily pregnant woman.) I think he's just trying to be a good Jesuit there and be fair to everyone, that one particularly passionate side wasn't being heard but presumed not to be worthy and I thought his point of NPR having an imbalanced approach on the topic was good.

I for one was shocked that someone as educated as writer Joyce Carol Oates expressed the view that pro-lifers seem just to be busybodies who want to regulate bedrooms, it's like she had no idea that some take abortion very seriously as killing an innocent life. I don't but still, how can she understand what their reasoning is if she doesn't have a clue and should shuddup until she has a better grasp of how some people think instead of slurring them all as unserious. I.E.what does she think, that all those holy anti-death penalty advocates are all for abortion on demand? You certainly can't solve something like this without addressing all serious points of view, people will fight forever if they think their view hasn't been considered. If she's an example of the kind of bubbles some people live in, they need to be burst.

It's not that tough -

PeraclesPlease — Mon, 16 May 2022 06:11:00 +0000

In reply to Is there room on @NPR for pro

It's not that tough - sometime after roughly 1st trimester the foetus starts growing life sustaining functions, including heart and nervous system, and presumably at some point feelings of pain, later early "feelings", primitive thoughts, expanding over the months. This does not yet mean a viable human being, but growing human-ish, and ever more so towards 9 months - 7 to 9 can often be saved as premature births so roughly already a human if all has gone well, below that the result is less human and more a danger of a horrid short painful life if survival for more than a few days/weeks is possible.

We largely base the 3 month period on when first organs, nerves, etc. start to appear and when they're starting to function together - limbs and such are also evolving, though thilese can mislead as to the level of life functions. But it's all pretty well documented science-wise. We'll know more in 100 years, but i don't expect too shocking a shift in the line between still just an embryo and what's starting to be human

From end of 3rd semester on we have decided that that "human-ish" development gains more and more importance as human rights, while the mother carrying that budding human also has human rights, so sometimes adverse development means careful awkward decisions balancing the 2. In general through month 7, tie goes to the mother in extreme cases (and these usually are extreme, not "abortion in demand"). Months 8 & 9 are much more complex and more effort will be made to save the now nearly-presumed "child" within reason for the mother (death or paralysis or other horrid side-effect would generally be show stoppers). These tough decisions are generally made with a doctor in tow, cuz they better know the odds and the possibilities. We see somewhat similar take-off-life-support decisions after accidents without a birth involved - it usually ain't that tough, even if heart-wrenching

Is there room on @NPR for pro

artappraiser — Mon, 16 May 2022 03:44:28 +0000

In reply to "Exclusive - Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows"

Is there room on @NPR for pro-life voices?

Over the past week I've traveled back and forth from NYC to Philly to care for a sick family member. In our Jesuit community car I've listened to hours of @NPR. Roughly 90% of the talk shows have been about abortion...
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022

This is no surprise, given the leaked SCOTUS decision on Roe v. Wade. Also, though I am pro life, for some of my close friends this decision is an outrage. Thus, the heavy coverage. But I've noticed that there have been, at least in the hours I've listened, no pro life voices...
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022

Usually I listen to @WNYC until about Exit 8 on the NJ turnpike and then switch to @whyy in Philly, so I've heard a lot of different talk shows. Each one features articulate and persuasive guests speaking about abortion and why the draft decision was wrong...
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022

Missing (at least in the many shows I've heard) was an articulate voice arguing other side. The only attempts are when the host would present the pro-life position only to have it batted away by the guest(s).

Here are some questions I would have asked:
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022

1) Obviously, many women (and men) are outraged by what they see as an assault on a woman's autonomy. But surely there some point when the fetus becomes a person. When is that? So how do you determine when that is a life worth protecting? Wouldn't it make some sense to...
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022

...be a maximalist when it comes to assigning life?

2) Legal scholars point to the fact that as a society advances, rights advance. But science advances as well, and we know more about the inner workings of the child in the womb. Are those advances worth considering, too?
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022

3) The Dred Scott decision is often mentioned as an example of a decision that was *rightly* overturned, as society came to understand more about human rights. Is it at least possible that we are seeing something similar in terms of understanding...
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022

...the personhood of the child in the womb?

4) The decision is obviously an affront to those who feel that a woman's body is her own. And, from a religious standpoint, women have consciences and can make a moral decisions. Both are important arguments. But...
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022

..when do the rights of the child come into play? And when? I.e., at what point does the child have rights? Obviously no one would countenance aborting a nine-month old child in the womb. One would say it was an assault upon the child's rights. So when are those rights...
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022

... enjoyed by the child? When the child emerges from the womb? Earlier? And if earlier, based on what criterion?
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022

5) Finally, do you see any value in arguments in favor of the protection of the life of the child in the womb? Can you see that in any way as an argument in favor of the vulnerable, even as the women themselves are often vulnerable?
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022

As I see it, there are in public (and religious) discourse some strong, compelling and logical arguments used by both sides. Needless to say, several of them conflict with one another:
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022

1) All life is sacred.
2) What is within the womb is either potential life or life itself.
3) An egg fertilized an hour ago is different than a nine-month old child about to be born.
4) Women have a right to privacy and self-autonomy.
5) Women have consciences.
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022

On NPR, we hear arguments 3 to 5. I would invite them to consider arguments 1 to 2. And to invite guests who can give voice to those arguments clearly and articulately. It is, after all, National Public Radio, and many in the nation believe these things...
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022

A calm, intelligent and articulate conversation with both sides might help others in this country enter into conversation in this time of division.
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 13, 2022