Abortion is in the constitution.

I was watching Lawrence O'Donnell tonight, and he brought this to my attention:

There is only word, or rather, right, common to each documents of our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, and the United States Constitution.

Here are the pertinent lines of each

The Declaration Of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
allowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness

The opening line of the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a perfect Union, establish
Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote
the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our
Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States Of America".
And that word, or rather, 'right', is the right to LIBERTY.

Liberty is the word.

Now, I've been hearing the right blather on about liberty for a long time now.

But how can they make this claim when they oppose abortion?

Here is Julie Rikelman, arguing for Center for Productive Rights, before the Supreme Court.

For a state to take control of a woman's body and demand that she go through
pregnancy, and childbirth, with all the physical risks of life-altering consequences
that brings is a fundamental deprivation of her liberty. Preserving a woman's right
to make this decision until viability protects her liberty while logically balancing the
other interest's at stake.

Elizabeth Prelogar, US Solicitor General:

To avoid profound damage to women's liberty, equality, and the rule of law, the court should affirm. If this court renounces the liberty interest recognized in Roe and reaffirmed Casey, it would be an unprecedented contraction of individual rights and a stark departure from principles of stare decisis. The court has never revoked a right that is so fundamental to so many AMericans and so central to their ability to participate fully and equally in society. THe court should not overrule the central component of women's liberty.

"Liberty" is the argument that republicans make to buy as many guns as they want, to take them wherever the want, and conceal them if they want.

Liberty is the argument republicans use that there is nothing that we can do to stop masser murder in a schools, churches, and the general marketplace.

Nothing we should do about it, they say, because it will infringe on 'liberty'.

The essential argument the right made in the court arguing for Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization was that, since 'abortion' was not mentioned in the Constitution,
SCOTUS should not have a role establishing abortion laws, and that that should be left entirely to the states.

However, it is a right the court has granted in Roe, and now Republicans want the court to take that right away.

Republicans will argue excessively about removing hurdles on the path to the guns, but argue incessantly, about the need for more hurdles to both 1. the voting booth, and 2. the abortion clinic.

This is the kind of 'liberty' of which republicans hypocritically speak.

What they really mean is only those liberties they approve of.

They are not about 'liberty' at all, they only pay lip service to it.

The issue of abortion is settled, really, if you read the constitution.

"Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".

A woman has the same right to Life, Liberty, and Happiness as much as a man.

Is that right directed at fetuses?

No.

Were the founding fathers thinking of fetuses when they wrote that line?

Most assuredly not, no mention of it anywhere.

Only to those of us who have been born, do the founding documents apply.

So, if the constitution is your argument, your argument flounders if you are against abortion, and pro-liberty, etc.

Reversing roe would deprive a woman of her right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Why do I say "Life'. because forcing a pregnancy could end the life of the woman. It does happen, and with blacks, it happens a lot more.

Because The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness also means the right to not be subject to arbitrary risks which could impede life, liberty, and happiness.

Therefore, abortion is constitutional. It's consistent with the concept of liberty, with privacy, and bodily autonomy.

To those who exclaim there is no 'bodily autonomy'?

https://www.unfpa.org/news/bodily-autonomy-busting-7-myths-undermine-individual-rights-and-freedoms

Not only is bodily autonomy a human right, it is the foundation upon which other human rights are built.

It is included, implicitly or explicitly, in many international rights agreements, such as the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Unless, of course, congress creates a law giving a fetus equal rights as a born human.
Until then, my argument stands.

If you want argue the philosophical, moral aspect, that is about the only place you can argue it, but not from the standpoint of the Constitution, in my humble opinion.

 

Well said, logical argument, bravo!

 

abortion is a medical service provided by a medical practitioner and as such she has no right to force someone to provide a service for her any more than me being fat endangers myself and therefore in the interest of my liberty I have a right to a gastric bypass.

Healthcare is not a right Democrats.

 

So were horrific Nazi medical experiments. Just saying...

If it is a "medical service", I would have to say it is more like a cosmetic plastic surgery, wouldn't you say? In that it is not medically necessary and is kind of unnatural.

Oh, and need we forget, the Hippocratic Oath doctors take that says "Do no harm".

You know if I bring in an unconscious person into the hospital and tell doctors to take a transfusion out of that person, even though it will kill them, and put it into me, to improve my health, that would also be a "medical procedure", wouldn't it?

 

And you are trying to use that as an argument in favor of Abortion???

But there is also LIFE. And life comes before liberty.


Oh, and it's also "endowed by their creator", not "allowed by their creator".

If you thought it had read "allowed", then I could see how you might have mistakenly thought that supported the notion of abortion.

 

Like someone famous (I forget who right now) once observed, "There is no liberty without the right to life".

This is similar to the Libertarian credo: "The right to life is the most fundamental of all human rights, without it no other rights are even possible."

Even Ayn Rand (a supporter of abortion, btw) wrote in her philosophy "The right to life is the source of all rights".

 

Oh, and what exactly are those risks?
You are aware that more women die in automobile accidents each year in the US than die in childbirth?
And how "life-altering" is pregnancy, if she gives it up for adoption?

(I've even heard the ridiculous argument in the Abortion section of this forum that it's "emotionally easier" for the woman to kill her baby in the womb than to have her child still be alive and not know what is happening to them)

 

Oh we wish to read the Constitution now do we ?

So you would agree that the right to keep and bear arms is part of that Liberty as well right?

 

How about preserving a woman's right to make the decision until some other earlier point? Maybe like 13 weeks?

Maybe have a limit on the number she can get? Like a "three strikes" law.

You know, there's other ways we can compromise.

Saying she can abort a healthy normal baby when there are no health problems all the way up to the point until it can survive on its own seems a little extreme, don't you think?

 

Her argument seems to be the Supreme Court has never revoked a right it has created before.

That doesn't seem to be too good of an argument.

Her statement comes across as seeming like it's saying that not having the right to abortion would be unprecedented, but that's not really what she's saying. The logic of her statement is actually saying that the literal act of taking it away, after it was created, even though it did not exist for a long time in the country's history before, would be "unprecedented".

 

I'm not exactly sure I would refer to pregnancy as an "arbitrary risk".

Your argument seems to be that if anything gets in the way or impedes our "life, liberty, and happiness", we have the right to avoid it. But such an argument doesn't fit with many other areas of life, does it?
For example, the draft. Someone has to fight the wars. If there's a big enough one, they might even have to draft people into it.
How about gun control?

Hmm, I guess the issue of child porn is settled too?

You know, crack cocaine makes some people "happy"...

 

I see, so a man having to pay child support when the woman refused to abort should also be unconstitutional, by that logic.

 

Yeah... The Constitution doesn't exactly say that.


(If you're thinking about the 14th Amendment, that does clarify that those born and naturalized on US soil are citizens, but doesn't mean that those who are not are not citizens)

 

No... His argument sounds nice, but if you actually take the time to piece it apart and think about it, it's really not.

We could come to many blatantly absurd conclusions if we accepted all that logic.

You just want to believe it's logical.

It's a bunch of seemingly logical arguments, and it's very long, and there is obviously some level of mental effort and intelligence that was put into it, but that level of mental effort and intelligence is not very deep. What I mean is it's the type of thing that's not totally stupid and idiotic, but it's not truly completely thought out either. It's like someone with a lot of intelligence started thinking hard and putting together an argument, and then at some point into it they just stopped thinking. Like "Wow, I came up with an argument, here it is. Now I'm not going to check it or really give it any additional thought to see if it holds up. Now on to the next argument!"

 

You're claiming federal judges have a right to be able to overturn state laws but not federal laws??

 

Arguing from a pro-life perspective:

1: The Constitution does not confer Rights. They affirm Rights that you already have. As such Congress does not have to create a law giving a ZEF the same Rights held by someone born. They are already held by those that are unborn.
2: Ever hear the phrase.... "Your Rights end at the tip of my nose."?

The biggest problem with progressives is that they only think a person has Rights if they allow it.

 

No their not.

 

So you believe that Rights are given by the Constitution?

 

Rights are created by people.

 

Thanks for proving my point.

 

Behold, ladies and gentlemen, a textbook example of pettifogging an argument.

The point, which you missed, entirely, is that a woman's right to abortion, if she is deprived of that right, her liberty has been deprived, her bodily autonomy has been deprived, and her privacy has been deprived if she is forced to remain pregnant beyond viability. The constitution provides for all three, and the parameter of viability has limited the right as it applies to abortion by the Roe decision, as do many SCOTUS rulings on the limitation of rights of one kind or another in various circumstances.

Nothing in your comment counters that fact.

 

Northam took care of your argument when he spoke glowingly about post-birth abortion as a right. Scientifically speaking, a unique person is characterized by a unique DNA signature. Based on science, murdering a baby is not an elective bruise by the mother. 15 weeks seems to me to be a reasonable compromise for a state to proffer. Some states may opt for more, others may want to allow abortion up to the point of acceptance or rejection by college.

In any case, the Federal Government should have no say in any medical procedure. If they wanted to get involved it should have been to call abortion a hate crime against blacks since it finds its roots in eugenics and Margaret Sanger's motive to clean up the gene pool. She was, after all, a prototypical Democrat.

 

Without an agency that guarantees those rights, it's just high minded language.

Evidence of that fact is the 'creator' reference, a concept of which no one can prove, so how can such be 'self evident'?

So, it's just waxing philosophic by the founding fathers, high minded language of the moment.

They could have written that the right comes from the government, or by the 'creator', it doesn't really matter because
in the end, there must be an agency that backs it all up or it's just fanciful talk.

The really important fact of the constitution is that it sets up that agency (the government) which guarantees those rights.

That aspect of the Constitution is, by many orders of magnitude, far more important than the concept of where rights
come from.

You could argue that you have a right to keep that $100 in your pocket because you earned it, and that right is 'an inalienable right endowed by the creator', but if you are unable to call the cops to stop someone from taking it away from you against your will, what does it matter if the 'creator' or the government gave you the right? it doesn't matter one bit except that one appeals to our emotions and the other doesn't. It's good that the founding documents are written in high minded language, it gives them a kind of sacred appeal, and that's a good thing for documents of that sort.

 

You're arguing in extra legal territory.

Until congress makes such a law, my argument stands.

And in the last line of my argument, that was the point I made, though I forgot to mention 'science'.

Science proves biology, but things like 'personhood' is the stuff of philosophy/culture etc and has to be codified to have any legal force.

Since the law does not give fetus personhood status warranting rights, my argument stands.

 

You have declared my argument false.

I gave you, in depth, my argument.

Yours doesn't rise beyond a vacuous declaration.

Merely declaring something isn't correct isn't an argument.

You have to actually argue your premise.

My argument rests on the following fact:

Until the law codifies a fetus as having the same rights as someone who has been born, then
abortion is a penumbra right of a woman covered by the liberty, bodily autonomy, and privacy aspects of the constitution, though limited by viability under Roe (noting that SCOTUS rulings often limit rights of one kind or another)..

You have, in point of fact, not offered any counter argument.