Alabama bans abortion

[Madner Kami]

Ha.
Ha.
Ha.

You people keep overlooking one very important detail: This law is not made to actually stick. It is literally tailor-made to provoke a supreme court reevaluation of Roe vs. Wade. It has no other purpose. This law is against the rights of the people, as long as Roe vs. Wade stays. And for some reason, I have the feeling that even this Supreme Court is going to vote in favour of Roe vs. Wade, if a decission is actually forced.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Well yeah that's the front that the left is fighting on. Ever since Kavanaugh was nominated by Trump it's been speculated that this is what they're gonna try to do.

Just in btw, Missouri passed a ban on abortions past 8 weeks.

[Darth Wedgius]

Are they decriminalizing rape? No.

But they are torpedoing a vital support network for survivors of rape.

Are they making beating your wife legal? No.

But they are making it materially more challenging for women abused by their husbands to leave their husbands.

Are they saying women can't wear pants? No.

Just that their lives are less worthy of preservation, of less value, than clusters of cells not yet distinguishable as human.

Because while many, apparently including you, are unwilling to examine the actual impact of such restrictive laws, the ghouls writing them surely are not. Any competent and reputable woman's health specialist will provide abortion care, because to not do so is unethical. Therefore, these bans will cause them to shutter their clinics, or carry on and end up in prison once they skirt close enough to the edges of the law for one angry boyfriend to "turn them in", or to start ignoring their patients out of fear of stepping too close to this arbitrary legal line.

Once that happens you have multiple knock-on effects. Such specialists are often a first-line caregiver in cases of rape, particularly familial and other intimate relationship (close friends, friends of family, etc) forms of rape. And lacking that expertise and avenue to form trust means many more cases of these things going unreported or undocumented.
Such specialists maintain contacts with violence shelters and other such lifelines. More than that, someone forced to carry the fetus of an abuser is less physically and materially capable of leaving them.
In those cases where health complications ARE present... well then we're having to define what constitutes a "risk to the life of the mother". How strict are the guidelines on this? Does the state get to legally challenge and examine documentation of all such cases? But it's a bit irrelevant because what actually will happen, especially after the decimation of the most skilled caretakers because of the above reasons, is doctors simply assuming anything shy of bleed out there on the table isn't a life-threatening risk. Won't be sent to prison for wrongful death.

As a bit of a coda, we can say definitively that at least one state senator who voted for this ban does not give one solitary fuck about the health of people giving birth. Larry Stutts is a sometime OBGYN who tried to repeal a bill requiring insurers to cover at least 48 hours of post-partum care in 2015. Said bill was named after a woman whose death he was later sued for medical malpractice over. That suit was settled, but going into state government and making one of his priorities repealing that specific bill? That tells you everything you need to know about his motives.

So the answer to all my questions is no. And the bill does not elevate a clump of cells over the woman, it just says she cannot kill it for her convenience. The complaint about the impact on women's health is a "Look what you'll make me do" kind of slippery slope argument. If the care providers leave, that's on them.

[Darth Wedgius]

Look at the right-wing attempts to repeal no-fault divorce, and those who say female breadwinners are unnatural. They are VERY much stuck in the worst aspects of the 1950s, and not only want to take us back to those times, but make it even worse than they were then. That said, I don't think those in charge who passed this really believe in it. It's like with the GOP, it caters to their hard-line, anti-intellectual base, the far fringe hard-righters, and that's all they care about in chasing voters. Don't feel so sad. The DNC does it too, in refusing to kick Sanders to the curb, call out his long and questionable history, and set limits for his new voters, who frankly wanted to hijack the party like the Tea Party did for the GOP. I've heard those in the center like me call them the Tea Party Left. The Green Tea Party. And so on.

No-fault divorce works both ways. I don't see how it could be called anti-woman unless women are more often at fault, something I'm not aware of being true.

And how many right-wingers say that women should not be breadwinners? I've never met one.

You're still assuming things abut people you disagree with.

[CmdrKing]

"It's not technically in effect yet and it will be challenged in court before it does" is not a compelling argument. Aside from laws causing sea change in advance of their implementation, and the general sense of suffocation that is the US under Republican rule, *and* the fact that bad actors are often emboldened to act in excess of the law when the movements of government suggest their excesses will not be punished, your read of the current state of the US court system is amazingly bad.

1) Basically the only thing Republicans have been doing at the national is appointing judges to the lower courts in the Federal system. It's going to get up to the SC.
2) Something like 7 states at time of writing have passed functionally identical laws. Alabama lacks the fig leaf of "6 weeks", but since "6 weeks" is a period better known as "can't say for sure if period is just late or pregnant", any of them would have the same core impacts as what I already outlined.
3) So millions of people are supposed to hang their futures on whether or not John Roberts is feeling extra prickly about States using badly written law to overturn decades-long SC decisions that morning and votes it down despite reliably ruling to limit abortion rights at every turn? Really?

[CmdrKing]

And the bill does not elevate a clump of cells over the woman, it just says she cannot kill it for her convenience.

Yes, it does. Creating an environment in which the penalties for being wrong about "life of the mother" include a lifetime in prison, then healthcare providers will err on the side of letting them die. That is so predictable an outcome failing to acknowledge it is in bad faith. And if you're letting people die rather than provide abortions, you're elevating those fetuses above them.

Similarly, if you're forcing people of good moral character to choose between watching people suffer and die for preventable reasons, lifelong imprisonment, or walking away from the situation, you're engineering an environment to get as many people to walk away as possible. You can choose to read the evidence differently if you want, but it's not a slippery slope, it's looking at possible outcomes of the presented scenario and analyzing the most likely one.
Unless your argument is we can never predict any outcome of an event and must always refer to case studies or history or something. In which case hey, I don't wanna go get my citations out so whatever.

[Yukaphile]

Prior to the 1970s, it was women who were the ones trapped in bad marriages, mostly thanks to religion, and so when no-fault divorce came, the divorce rate skyrocketed.

[clearspira]

Look at the right-wing attempts to repeal no-fault divorce, and those who say female breadwinners are unnatural. They are VERY much stuck in the worst aspects of the 1950s, and not only want to take us back to those times, but make it even worse than they were then. That said, I don't think those in charge who passed this really believe in it. It's like with the GOP, it caters to their hard-line, anti-intellectual base, the far fringe hard-righters, and that's all they care about in chasing voters. Don't feel so sad. The DNC does it too, in refusing to kick Sanders to the curb, call out his long and questionable history, and set limits for his new voters, who frankly wanted to hijack the party like the Tea Party did for the GOP. I've heard those in the center like me call them the Tea Party Left. The Green Tea Party. And so on.

No-fault divorce works both ways. I don't see how it could be called anti-woman unless women are more often at fault, something I'm not aware of being true.

And how many right-wingers say that women should not be breadwinners? I've never met one.

You're still assuming things abut people you disagree with.

Fun fact: the ''women should work attitude'' was a view that was already well on its way to dying by the 1950s. Women worked all the time in this era, they were just stuck as waitresses, cleaners, secretaries etc. The idea that only the men worked and women were chained at home is pre-war at best. And even then, there were MANY exceptions particularly among farming families where women and young children had no choice but to work the fields from dawn till dusk unless they felt like going hungry and broke.

Its been my observation that people have a view of history that either fits agendas or has been forged by a laziness to do some actual research. Actual history is nowhere near as black and white as certain people with certain views will have you believe.

[clearspira]

Prior to the 1970s, it was women who were the ones trapped in bad marriages, mostly thanks to religion, and so when no-fault divorce came, the divorce rate skyrocketed.

We are not talking about 1970 though, we are talking about 2019. And in 2019 it very much works both ways like Darth said.

[Madner Kami]

Fun fact: the ''women should work attitude'' was a view that was already well on its way to dying by the 1950s. Women worked all the time in this era, they were just stuck as waitresses, cleaners, secretaries etc. The idea that only the men worked and women were chained at home is pre-war at best. And even then, there were MANY exceptions particularly among farming families where women and young children had no choice but to work the fields from dawn till dusk unless they felt like going hungry and broke.

Its been my observation that people have a view of history that either fits agendas or has been forged by a laziness to do some actual research. Actual history is nowhere near as black and white as certain people with certain views will have you believe.

This is true. It was only the rich families, where women had the luxury of not working. It was the rapid expansion of general wealth that allowed the man to be sole feeder of the family to be true for more than than just the uppermost echelons of society and if you pay attention, the wages have stagnated since quite a while now while inflation marched on and lo and behold, you see more and more women taking jobs. History repeating itself.

And @ CmdrKing: I am not making an arguement to not dispute the law's virtue, I am making an arguement that the left is gearing up to fight the wrong foe or at least at the wrong front. What the Republicans have done here is literally creating a red rag. You really need to think about whether it's wise to attack the rag, because if you've been paying attention, you'd know that a knife is hiding behind it, ready to stab.