Meanwhile, a person, a human person, must have at least minimal capacity for basic cognition and rudimentary choice. It must possess a brain, at the very least, which evinces definite brain waves. Anything that doesn't is a quasi proto-human entity, but clearly not a person. The logical error made is called the "genetic fallacy" as first pointed out by Antony Flew in his marvelous monograph, 'Thinking About Thinking'. . That is, arguing that because a thing is going to become something, it IS something. It would be like me picking up an acorn and claiming it's an oak tree. Nope. No way.
Then there is the aspect of unintended consequences. Consider here, that if Alito's brainchild of "fetal persopnhood" is ultimately confirmed the destruction of ALL fertilized eggs is outlawed . Then that would mean wholesale banning of all birth control devices as well as Mifepristone. For example, it would ban the use of all IUDs, or intra-uterine devices, by virtue of the fact that while they permit fertilization they impede the attachment of the fertilized egg to the uterine wall. Hence, any woman using one would -by the letter of the law- be eligible for imprisonment, perhaps up to five years or more. The morning after pill would also be criminal to use, because its primary benefit is to interfere with the fertilization. The pill delays ovulation or thickens cervical mucus to prevent sperm from reaching the egg, meaning that fertilization can't occur. (In one 2014 Colorado personhood amendment it was condemned as 'premature murder')
Examples cited for the original Colo. amendment, included:
- -In 2004, Melissa Ann Rowland was charged with murder in Utah after one of her twins was stillborn. Doctors had warned her to get a C-section and she refused. She eventually received 18 months probation for the lesser counts of child endangerment.
- - In 2009, Samantha Burton showed signs of premature labor at 25 weeks pregnant. Her doctor found she wasn’t in labor but refused to allow her to leave a Florida hospital for a second opinion and obtained a court order requiring Burton to undergo all medical procedures the doctor advised. The baby, which was then removed by C-section, was stillborn. Only later did a higher court agree the woman’s rights were violated.
- - In 2010, Christine Taylor fell down the stairs after feeling lightheaded. After confiding to a nurse she considered abortion at one point in her pregnancy she was arrested for attempted suicide.
- In October, 2021, Brittney Proclaw was charged with feticide after a medical examiner found traces of meth in the liver and brain of her miscarried fetus.
This sort of religio-political insanity - inanity is possible when the promoters (like the misguided whitey females shown below - after the SC overthrow of Roe:
"The premoral mind confuses the disgusting with the wrong and retains an infantile fear of things sexual. Its rationality is overcome by emotion, fantasy, wish and projection. The belief that extracting a 10-week fetus from a woman's womb is murder rests to a large extent on the sense of disgust aroused by the thought of destruction of living tissue.
"When fundamentalists insist on risking the life of the mother to deliver an anencephalic fetus they take this tendency to an extreme. People who think this way are unable to override disgust with rational appreciation of the objective characteristics of the fetus. The ability to do so is an indispensable trait of the moral mind."
Why don't the anti-abortionists have this endless mourning for the dead embryos, fetuses? Well, first - because there are too many and they'd never have an end to funerals or morbid grief - as Mendelson points out. Second, because the premoral mind only makes a federal case out of it when individual women are seen trekking to Planned Parenthood for abortions! IF those were carried out silently, discreetly in private (like nature does), say using an abortion pill- none of this would be known and no anti-abortion hysteria could exist. Mendelson also goes on to make a point regarding the false moral righteousness of those like Alito, e.g. Mendelson,p. 160.
"To equate the termination of an early pregnancy with the death, indeed the murder, of an infant or child is not merely morally uncalled for but dangerous. It implicitly demeans the value of real people's lives, both adults' and children's, and confuses the reasons why we protect them so vigilantly. If our moral obligations to one another are abstracted from our capacities for feeling, thinking, intending and wanting - from everything that makes us human and forms the ground for our care and protection of each other- we are thrown back into a premoral kind of thinking.
To regard the destruction of insensate agglomerations of cells that contain human DNA as the destruction of a person's life is to step outside the moral into the brutal and dangerously irrational kind of thought that substitutes taboo for reason. It is a regression to quasi-magical thinking."
See Also:
by Thom Hartmann | May 20, 2023 - 7:57am | permalink
You’ve probably never heard of Anthony Comstock, a Civil War Union soldier and New York Postmaster, who died in 1915. You need to learn about him and his legacy, however, as his long fingers are about to reach up out of the grave and wrap themselves around the necks of every American woman of childbearing years.
Anthony Comstock was a mama’s boy who hated sex. His mother died when he was 10 years old and the shock apparently never left him; women who didn’t live up to her ideal were his open and declared enemies, as were pornography, masturbation, and abortion. He was so ignorant of sex and reproduction that he believed a visible human-like fetus developed “within seconds” of sexual intercourse.
And:
by Amanda Marcotte | April 12, 2023 - 7:18am | permalink
The most crucial thing to understand in the aftermath of Friday's decision to rescind the FDA approval of Mifepristone by Donald Trump-appointed Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is this: It is not a ban on medication abortion in the U.S. Pill-induced abortions will still be available, even if this decision is allowed to stand. They will continue to be safe. But aborting a pregnancy without Mifepristone will just be a more miserable experience than it was before the far-right district court judge ignored all law and science to impose his anti-choice ideology on the health care access of millions of Americans.
And:
Could Revival Of An 1873 Law Really Make Medicated Abortion Illegal Nationwide Now?
