I say that Maine's law goes too far. You say that it is a solution to doctors having to worry about prosecution, but I pointed out there are plenty of other more reasonable possible solutions. Pro-choicers didn't like those because they didn't go far enough when it comes to choice. I suspect that "saving women's lives" was the fake issue at play here.
You are TRYING to make each and every instance become a political decision. This is medicine. Politicizing every decision like that is just not even SLIGHTLY acceptable. Medical ethicists follow the principle of patient autonomy.
Well, ideally the law should make a better attempt to try to foresee all the different possible types of situations that could arise, and give direction on how to deal with those situations. I fear if we do not make these medical decisions into political decisions, women, doctors, and pro-choicers will abuse it, will murder babies knowing there will be no consequences for them. I fear that many pro-choicers actually support late-term abortion in the absence of any health reasons, and that these sorts of laws are just a cover for them. Allow it without making it obvious that the law will allow it. And the woman can shop around for any doctors she wants, can't she? Even if 99% of doctors believe it is wrong, she can still find that 1% who will do it for her. It's not like she is forced to go to a random doctor and then if that doctor tells her no that is the decision she has to accept. When it comes to abortion, doctors practically advertise what they will do. The woman is not being seen by the "average" doctor. She is going to the doctor whom she already knows will do what she wants. Claiming that this is about "medicine" or a "decision between a woman and a doctor" is absurd, and in my opinion disingenuous.
Alabama prosecutors (and those in some other states) are demanding information Alabama residents whose abortions were carried out in states where abortions are legal. Clearly, Alabama legal authorities believe you are wrong.
It is likely that they will not have legal basis to be able to compel that information from another state. But I think this is a separate topic of discussion. You can take that discussion to one of the other threads such as this one: A contentious issue of jurisdiction
Nobody can write medicine of this breadth and depth into law. The interaction between pregnancy and other health conditions (both physical and psychological) is not something that lends itself to that. The problem I have with your last sentence is that women have personal bodily autonomy. You do NOT get to be their morality police. You don't get to make laws women who smoke while pregnant, drink alcohol, get adequate nutrition, get checkups, or do anything else that is related to fetal care, either. It's HER body, NOT YOURS.
Some attempt can be made to try. That is why I suggested a bioethics council. They would be in charge of approving exceptions to the law, or for medical situations that are obviously legal grey zones. It is true that the law probably cannot foresee absolutely every situation. Most likely doctors are not going to be prosecuted if what they did was the correct medical decision and they had reason to believe that the law allowed them to do what they did.
That's not entirely true. Women who excessively binge drink, or who use drugs, can and will be criminally charged if pregnant. But that is another separate topic. One which we've discussed before in other threads.
There is no evidence that rising maternal mortality has anything to do with laws that affect abortion access. (If you claim there is, please show the evidence in a separate thread and you can leave the link here)
While that is an interesting comparison to try to draw, I think those two issues are very different, for several reasons. Usually with gambling, the one running the gambling operation is viewed as the one most in the wrong, with a view that they are taking money from vulnerable people. So the people that go across state lines to gamble are not going to be the target so much. Gambling is also more of just an issue of money, and it's going to be very hard for one state to tell an individual how much money they are allowed to take with them and how they can spend it in another state. I think states are more tolerant of gambling allowed in other states because even though it does not stop their residents from gambling it can easily greatly reduce the frequency of their gambling, and so usually the amount of money that will be gambled. Lastly, gambling is seen as a less serious issue than abortion. The issue of abortion would be more about taking a resident of one state (the fetus or unborn child) to another state to victimize that vulnerable child. If you want to have a specific argument about legal jurisdiction between different states and how that would work, I think it would be best to have that discussion in a different thread that is about that specific topic.
You're missing the point on late term abortions. There are essentially ZERO late term abortions that aren't health related. By writing a law about this, prosecutors get to second guess the health care decision making of the doctor and the woman.
No, this is NOT a valid approach - not even SLIGHTLY. The idea of trying to write such laws and they offering them to prosecutors to second guess doctors, who ARE the experts, is absolutely NO MORE than an assault on women's health care. It means that doctors have to be ignoring what they believe is best treatment in favor of guessing what a prosecutor may be able to charge them for doing. Prosecutors DO NOT belong in the room when such decisions are made.
It's not another topic. (Plus, I know of NO state where this is true, nor is it in federal law.) Your ideas directly involve legal action taken against a woman who is pregnant.
That is why I think a bioethics council is needed. We cannot be giving the power to one single doctor to decide whatever they want to do. Especially because women from all over will seek out and go to that one doctor, with the pre-knowledge that he will do what they want. As I explained before, women who want abortion are usually not just going to some random ordinary doctor and then following that doctor's opinion. So this is not really comparable to ordinary medical decisions. A doctor who specializes in abortion has usually already decided that they generally approve of abortions. There might be some, or many doctors, who are more hesitant about abortion, but they did not choose to specialize in the field of abortion. So if you are talking about a woman going to an abortion doctor and asking what he thinks, clearly there is some selection bias with that sort of situation. (Not to mention financial conflict of interest. In an ordinary medical procedure the patient who was harmed could later sue the doctor if they think the procedure was unnecessary. But this is simply not possible when it comes to abortion, when the intended outcome of the medical procedure was to kill the patient)
About half of states are restrictin/prohibiting abortions. The other half are making them available, some with no restrictions, even right up to the point of birth. Travel to a neighboring state is hardly an impossibility for most, and need not be expensive. Again, you want to imply that pregnant women seeking an abortion are automatically poor or can't travel. That is clearly not the case, it is the exception.
Sounds like another red herring from the pro-choice crowd. Do you think the doctor will really have to worry about prosecution if he does it when it is urgently required? (Even if this were the case, I'm sure the law could be worded to allow emergency situations if there is not available time to get a decision from the bioethics council. And in any case, these days with the advent of telemedicine it would probably not be difficult to get a decision within one or two hours. Could even outsource it to a trusted doctor in India to be able to get an emergency decision if the time was midnight and it was very urgent. Nevertheless I suspect these sort of situations would be very rare)
Showing a correlation between different U.S. states does not prove that one causes the other. It just so happens there is a pattern in the U.S. that many of the poorer and more rural areas have less permissive abortion laws. In addition to many of the states in the Deep South being both run by conservatives and having higher African American population percentages. We've been over this in other threads.
Its not a checkerboard pattern An abortion is not 'a neighboring state away' It's several states away. . If you live in Mississippi, Nebraska, or South Carolina , or Florida, how many states and miles do you have to travel to get to a pro-choice state? You don't have to be poor, to have this problem. You are going to need several days there and back to travel by car - if you own your own reliable car, if your employer will give you the time off, if you can find someone to go with you, if you are healthy. Stop minimizing.
Well, if you're in Nebraska head west to Colorado. But the real issue is reaching for the worst case to demonize those positions not in line with yours. Abortions remain available in America, as is adoption. An unexpected pregnancy is going to be stressful and no matter what it will be life changing. So far the discussion has been all about mom and the difficulties she faces when abortion is her chosen course. What of alternative courses, and while we're at it, what about that baby?
In a previous era of time in American history, the majority of sexual intercourse happened within marriage (or at least between two people who were considering the possibility of future marriage in the near future). So under those conditions, an "unexpected pregnancy" did not have the same connotations it does today. It's not a coincidence that elective abortions-on-demand first appeared on a large scale around New York City, Chicago and in movie industry circles in California. It's commonly claimed it begun in the 1960s but actually it has roots that go back to 1920. Although probably prostitutes got abortions in the Wild West in the 1860s. Coincidentally, the governor in Maine (July 2023) just signed a law that will make it no longer a crime for women to sell sex (although it is still a crime for the men who pay them). Which goes to show that abortion and sexual liberalization kind of go hand in hand. A lot of people are moving to Maine from big city areas in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut, escaping the high housing costs.
