Supreme Court Leak

[pasayten]

Obviously, the point is the vast majority of abortion has nothing to do with your arguments! And Ray, if men can’t speak out about killing children I think you may have really missed so much of what Jesus taught!

It's a personal issue between the woman and God... In many cases, also the man who impregnated her... Doesn't contraceptives prevent the creation of life? Nothing said about that by the "righteous" ones... Speaking out is different than legislation and making the decision for someone else... Legislation is not the issue for this case... Education and support is... But that costs time, effort, and $$$ that the church and society does not seem to want to invest sufficiently in. Maybe more men/women should put their $$$ and support where their mouth is... Donating spare change to Care-net once a year is not cutting it...

[dorankj]

Prosecute the men, hold them responsible, fine. I’m trying to advocate for not killing the absolute most innocent, the child. If you believe we all have a soul, there WILL be an accounting! Plus killing innocent is always wrong in all cultures and religions.

[PAL]

Yeah, what's one little percentage and a half of a percentage? Who cares about those women that get raped and become pregnant. Or the child that is raped and becomes pregnant in those states that want to impose that. Again, they did not think that through. So it has to be about control-who would make that kind of law? Sharia law.

"No-one will be required to carry a dead fetus you freak. It’s a leaked preliminary opinion, not final."

You know this for a fact Ken? With this scary untrustworthy court, it's most probably final. We women have to be ready and we will be.
That is also just Raygun's opinion. Old, just like Alito's. Quoting from the 17th century. What a dip.

And it's not killing babies if the mother's life is endangered. And some women who have a cancer diagnosis, cannot get radiation or chemo if they are pregnant. So I could list a thousand more scenerios, where abortion should be allowed. And women should have a choice anyway and it's no ones business except between a woman and her doctor.

[dorankj]

https://youtu.be/JBpGac4c6wk

[dorankj]

Killing babies is NOT healthcare! No-one will be required to carry a dead fetus you freak. It’s a leaked preliminary opinion, not final. Get a grip.

[Rideback]

Context explains what happens to your argument. https://www.axios.com/2022/05/04/aborti ... -women-map

The new laws that are already hitting the streets and which would be emboldened by Alito's opinion would not only cut access to women whose lives would be endangered by carrying to term, but women who are carrying dead fetuses, fetuses that are mangled and incomplete as well.

And of course we can talk about a husband or partner's role...did you not see that 'Casey' that Alito wants to also strike down is the ruling that no longer must a women get permission from her husband to have an abortion?

The way this opinion is written the doors are open to end birth control pills and devies. If you're trying to minimize the impact by saying only a low number seek abortions because of rape and incest, how many have to happen before that becomes important to you? How many women must be refused health care before it matters to you, give me your magic number?

[dorankj]

Obviously, the point is the vast majority of abortion has nothing to do with your arguments! And Ray, if men can’t speak out about killing children I think you may have really missed so much of what Jesus taught!

[pasayten]

[dorankj]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nat ... 211175001/

[dorankj]

Just 1% of women obtain an abortion because they became pregnant through rape, and less than 0.5% do so because of incest.

[Rideback]

https://www.propublica.org/article/abor ... jTmKR-87I0

[PAL]

Good points Rideback and David. Thanks. The states that say no abortions, no matter what, did not think it through. If a 10 yr. is starting their menses and she gets raped and becomes pregnant, then is she going to be forced to carry the baby to term. It is really that insane now?
I hope this does not get premepted like my last 2 posts about this subject.

[Rideback]

Yes, it is about control and it is political

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... f-roe.html

[mister_coffee]

"Inconvenience" is, I don't know, being required to wear a mask when around others during a pandemic.

Having a creature grow inside you for nine months before it is messily and painfully discharged from your body, often at considerable risk to your own life, is not an "inconvenience".

[Rideback]

Abortion is not now and never has been about 'inconveniece'. It is about health care. Women often cannot carry a baby to term, life throws complications at her and when there is a problem that threatens her life certainly everyone should agree that our health care system should be ready and willing to save her life.

Looking at the 11 year old girls who are being raped in Ukraine by the Russian soldiers is not unique to the Ukraine war. Children are raped here in the US by the hour, every day, they are trafficked, they are abused. If and when those children become pregnant shouldn't our 'modern civilized' society grant them the health care to have an abortion?

Alito's opinion is directed at the Mississippi law which does not provide exceptions for rape, incest or the health of the mother. In Texas, their new abortion law offers rewards of $10,000 for citizens to turn in women who are seeking abortions. States are following the Texas example.

Alito is claiming that the moment of conception is when a fetus is a human being. That concept may bode well with some extremist factions of the GOP but it goes against the beliefs of other religions like the Jewish who believe a soul is not created until the actual act of birth. Alito also disregards the findings of science. He uses as historical context the text and words of a man who actually condoned burning witches at the stake. A pretty big stretch to connect those dots.

[dorankj]

America HAS been heavily taxed and has hugely reduced world hunger! I’m really not sure how that justifies killing innocent children for convenience?

[mister_coffee]

I'm 100 percent certain now that the government is going to force women to give birth, that same government is going to pay for generous and complete prenatal care for all women carrying a child.

[dorankj]

The thing with the King Solomon reference, the baby lives!

[Rideback]

'The Supreme Court Plays Solomon but Leaves Out the Wisdom.
We would like to believe that our highest court has the wisdom of Solomon. In the Biblical story, two women come before the king claiming a baby is theirs. Solomon calls for a sword. If both mothers claim the child, he will cut it in half and give half to each mother. One woman says cut it in half! The other says, give it to the other women so the baby will live. Solomon gives the baby to the woman who wanted to see the baby live, the true mother. And King Solomon’s name forever becomes linked with wisdom and justice.
You may recall the earlier part of this Biblical story, when Solomon, realizing his own shortcomings and limitations as a ruler, asked God for the wisdom to rule. He could have asked for anything, but he asked for wisdom. God was so impressed that he gave Solomon not only wisdom but vast riches.
In the United States we have a Supreme Court, the ultimate arbiter of the Law, the highest place of justice, and, we hope, a place, not of perfection, but a place that aspires to wisdom, decency, humanity, fairness, and justice: if not Solomon-like, at least trying to get there.
Now comes a leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision on abortion that looks to overturn the precedent of the last 50 years in the Roe v Wade decision of 1973, that made abortion legal in all fifty states, but allowed for state regulation. While not formally released, this “first draft” looks to be very much in its final form, with five justices concurring with the draft that Roe v. Wade should be overturned and that decisions on abortion should be returned to state governments for their legislative “wisdom.” Unlike Solomon, the Court has decided to pass the buck to the States: much as Pontius Pilate did with the fate of Jesus—let the local authorities decide, we wash our hand of this issue.
If the high court does issue this ruling in its current form, at least half the states in the Union will ban or severely restrict the circumstances under which a woman can seek an abortion. Laws that were overturned by Roe in some states, will come back into force. Other states, anticipating the overturn of Roe, have passed laws restricting abortion that will go into effect the minute the Court decree is announced.
It is Justice Samuel Alito who has written this majority opinion—which runs to 98 pages.
He begins his elaborate, deeply flawed, argument with a Solomon-like story. “Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” This is the opening sentence of his narrative. Yes, Mr. Justice, we all knew this. Then he describes several variations on our collective disagreements about abortion. Some say personhood occurs at conception “and that abortion ends an innocent life.” Others, Alito says, feel that any regulation of abortion “invades a woman’s right to control her own body and prevents woman from achieving full equality.” Still other Americans think abortion should be legal under “some but not all circumstances….”
In Alito’s narrative, unlike Solomon’s, there are three groups of Americans that purport to express the “truth” of the situation. The court seems to be grappling with the problem of how to satisfy all three groups. So what is Alito and his Court majority to do? They don’t have Solomon’s wisdom to make a moral decision. So Alito turns to history for guidance. History that he makes up. The first sentence of his historical narrative is so full of flawed assumptions that it strikes me as propaganda. “For the first 185 years after the adoption of the Constitution, each State was permitted to address this issue in accordance with the views of its citizens. Then, in 1973 this Court decided Roe v. Wade…. Even though the Constitution makes no mention of abortion, the Court held that it confers a broad right to obtain one.”
This historical narrative covers 185 years of our history in a sentence that contains far more untruth than truth. It lacks so much nuance, and leaves out so much context, that it becomes a false history. When Alito states that “each State was permitted to address this issue in accordance with the views of its citizens,” I ask: who were those citizens? ALL WHITE MALES. Women were not even citizens who could vote for the first 131 years of Alito’s outrageous history. Alito dates history from drafting of the Constitution, in 1787, not from its ratification in 1789, a minor point perhaps, but not to a majority of the Court who seem to adhere to the idea that God created the Constitution in the Miracle at Philadelphia in 1787, and like the Bible, it is holy text, not to be veered from by mere mortals.
Alito’s history improves when he cites statistics about how many states “prohibited abortion at all stages until the passage of Roe in 1973”: it was thirty states. If this new Court edict is announced, we will be set back to a similar situation, as if the last half century did not teach us anything about how to humanly and with justice provide equal rights to all citizens, and not just white males. Just as we were 185 years ago, there is no state government, and certainly not our national government, or any branch of it, that is controlled by a majority of women, the one group that must deal, in all its complexity, with the issue of abortion.
I fear the worsening politicization of the Supreme Court. And a worsening division among the people of this nation. This leak, no matter who leaked it, reveals how far detached from the 21st Century the majority of the Court is. They seem lost in ideological theories of originalism, as if we are frozen in the past, a distant past when the Constitution was drafted. Justice Alito says abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution. So it can’t be a constitutional right. This is, and always has been an outrageous interpretation of the Constitution, as if it was sacrosanct, and not the work of mortal flawed men, only men, many of whom espoused liberty and freedom while holding slaves.
Let’s get this straight. The Constitution, as much as I love it and defend it, was a document drafted by men, not gods. It is not a holy document from which all wisdom flows. We the People of the 21st Century cannot be confined by the thinking of the 18th Century. We learn from it and build on it. To stay stuck in the past is a formula for decay.
I want to trust the Supreme Court. I want to believe in our Constitutional system of government. It is not the Constitution and our three branches of government that are at fault. It is the particular individuals who now occupy the decision making. Five of just nine Americans will decide the fate of millions of women. These five have been nominated by a political party that is growing more and more out of touch with the majority of the people. Three of the five were appointed by the most controversial and demagogic president in our history. They are mostly elite ideologues who know the law but not the people affected by it. They think and write in legal abstractions. I don’t expect the court to be unanimous on most issues. There are great complexities that remain unresolved and have no simple or straightforward solution. Roe v. Wade did not fix all the complexities of abortion. But it pointed toward a better solution. Justice Alito, along with the majority of his colleagues declared in this leaked draft that Roe was "egregiously wrong.” Wow! Tell us how you really feel!
The Roe v. Wade decision gave woman a clear right that they did not have before. This new decision threatens to remove that right. The history of this nation has been about the expansion of rights, hard fought for and way too long in coming for so many. But the Alito draft takes us backward and takes away rights from American women: the right to an abortion and the right of privacy. This cannot stand.
I see the current High Court as captives of faulty ideologies that only foster and extend the deep divisions among the American people. And when I say, “American people,” I should be more accurate and say “American peoples” because we are all not of the same religion, political party, economic status, educational attainment, ideological persuasion, the same sex, or sexual orientation, race, or ethnic origins. Why can’t we see this diversity as beauty?
We are many peoples trying to be one. E Pluribus Unum was a goal, a quest, never a settled reality. In our search for union, for harmony, for stability, and most of all for justice and equality, we have made strides forward. But I cannot help but see this pending abortion decision to be a giant step backward into a dark past. I feel this way especially when I look at how so many state governments have become corrupted by big money interests and demagogic tendencies, like those in Florida, Texas, and other states, whose leaders will exploit our differences for their personal power, rather than bring us together for the common good.
In the final analysis, while this is specifically about abortion rights, it is more deeply an assault on privacy, and on the government’s ability to intrude on the individual decisions of citizens. This leaked Court decision says to me that women are not equal citizens. Who among us is next in the assault on individual freedom, and this nation’s unfortunate turn toward fascism and white nationalism?
To return to my opening story about King Solomon. It seems to me that the Supreme Court of the United States is willing to use its sword to cut both the fetus and the mother in half. There is no wisdom, and no justice in this “egregiously flawed” decision. Ray Smock.

[mister_coffee]

I think it is very difficult for men to participate in a discussion about abortion without sounding like horrible jerks. Basically, men opposed to abortion are demanding that women run risks and make decisions that they would never have to make and could not possibly make. I am 99 percent certain this would never be a debate if men could get pregnant.

If any of the forced birth crowd wanted to sell me on their position, one way to do it was to demand that safe contraception be freely available to all humans of childbearing age. That wouldn't eliminate the case for abortions but at least would greatly reduce their number, and if this is about saving and protecting human lives that would be a Good Thing. But the people demanding others be forced to give birth go crazy and gnash their teeth when you make this simple, practical suggestion.

Which leads me to conclude that this has nothing to do with innocent unborn babies, and is all about exercising power over others.

[PAL]

Ken, it's between a woman and her doctor. The GOP doesn't have compassion for the babies once they are out of the womb. They did not vote for the child tax credit law. Alabama and another southern state, rank very low in women's health care and I'm not talking just about abortion here.
Do you have compassion for the women that are raped or incest is committed against them and then would have to bear the baby? You have a right to your beliefs, but I hope that aspect of rape and incest and bearing the baby, is not one of them. You are very good at making generalizations about me and my beliefs and whether I feel compassion or not. It is not an easy decision for women to decide to have an abortion. There are various reasons and none are our business.
Next up, requiring women to wear chasity belts.

[dorankj]

If only you here would show the same passion, really ANY compassion for the innocent babies in this question! Sorry, (not sorry) your death cult is being slightly disrupted.

[PAL]

Really! How insulting to women and cruel.
For a good read the Atlantic Monthly has a good article on the underground movement women are forming about abortion.
This whole thing going on right now, pits women against women. It will be a battle.
And what sickos think a woman should have to bear the child of her rapist or incestious rapist? Hasn't the trauma of rape or incest been enough?
Oh, they must have been asking for it. These guys, yes these friggin old old men need to, well, I can think of a number of things that need to happen to them.
Great articles.

[Rideback]

Punditry is pointing out that a week before 'the leak' of the draft there was an editorial in the WSJ that talked, pretty much out of the blue, about the case before the court to end Roe. It even broke down the scenario of how Roberts might be getting 'squishy' and how it would likely be Alito who would write the majority opinion. The same structure that this article used was also in another op ed, this one was when the ACA was before the court and in that circumstances Roberts sided in favor of keeping it.

Despite Ted Cruz talking into any microphone he can find that the leak is a liberal debacle and should be 'prosecuted' by DoJ, the leak to Politico of the actual draft is not a crime. In fact it is one of 3 leaks and maybe if we think about it, more than that.

Personally, I'm hoping Clarance Thomas gave a copy to Ginny but it's more likely that it was Alito.

[mister_coffee]

This whole thing can only be described as antediluvian or quite literally medieval.

Alito quoted prominent 17th-century jurist Sir Matthew Hale. Sir Matthew Hale, as well as being so informed on the topic of abortion, sentenced two witches to die.

https://jezebel.com/supreme-court-roe-v ... 1848872890