Your type of reasoning here is not valid. Just because the other side misbehaves doesn’t mean we should agree to sacrifice THIS baby to save THAT one, or even THOSE. The bedrock principle is that ALL lives have infinite value, and unless we are willing to protect all lives, we can be compromised, which is how we got here in the first place. It’s not that we should refuse to support any bill, but that we shouldn’t be INITIATING the exceptions. Let the other side do that. Then if the bill saves some babies, we can support it as a compromise on their part moving in OUR direction. But the moment WE start proposing it is OK to sacrifice THIS baby, we are playing THEIR game, and we lose our legitimacy. Remember, rape was the exception that drove us into abortion on demand throughout nine months.
This bill does NOT propose a “compromise.” It is an attempt to save as many babies as possible because as of this moment, all unplanned babies are getting aborted, pro-lifers are getting ignored and we are not in a position to bargain, only to beg. Our choices are, just sitting there being complicit to the genocide of one million abortions per year, or saving as many babies as we can based on our most viable choices. It does NOT mandate abortions for rape victims. It does mandate pre-abortion counseling, 48 hour wait periods and education starting at the high school level about fetal development, what abortions procedures are like, the psychological and physical risks of abortion and her options/resources. The high school awareness class also teaches against all forms of exploitation, coercion and abuse, and “player culture.” precursors which would teach men to treat women better and avoid those harmful behaviors. I do not accept sacrificing 99.5% of viable babies because of your desire to virtue signal. Additionally, again, no law is permanent or perfect. It can be revisited at any time. Finally, I have heard of the statistic about the majority of victims carrying to term, but I could not find a link. I like to collect links and sources; if you have one on hand, can you please share?
it shouldn’t be considered in anyway either. its prehistoric. extremely archaic and outmoded.
Thanks for your vote!
privately you should be able to get any dam medical procedure you like. it’s your damn money and it’s up to the discretion of the medical practitioner to refuse you. you are the customer.
making private medical assistance more affordable (as cheap as a netflix subscription) is not beyond the scope of this discussion or reality.
that will be my only stance until i’m shown the hard data on why lowering private medical costs is not feasible.
It’s obvious that you’ve put a lot of effort into fleshing out this policy proposal. And while I am opposed to maternal homicide in practically all cases (>95% are elective abortions of convenience/lifestyle conservation, which is simply infanticide), my political philosophy, regardless of the issue, ultimately comes down to the question “what does the Constitution say about this?”
Trump is right that abortion is clearly a matter for the states and for the people under the 10th Amendment. There is no enumerated power in Art. 1 Sec. 8 granting Congress authority to legislate or fund abortion or any other medical procedure (except for veteran war wounds). I am a big fan of the plain language the Constitution was written in and do not think it wise when people try to stretch the ancient parchment to cover an issue that’s unenumerated.
On the practical side, I also think the abortion worshippers will not be mollified by this policy even if it were enacted completely. They’ve made it clear they want unfettered infacticide and won’t settle until they have it.
But for constitutional reasons alone, you would need to have a super-majority of states ratify an amendment giving the federal government power over abortion before this policy could be legitimately implemented. The danger there is that, once the federal government has that power, the abortion worshippers could use it to do terrible things, like federalizing unfettered abortion up to and even past the birth of a living child. Remember, Dems voted lockstep to ram through the thoroughly unconstitutional Obamacare when they controlled Congress and the White House.
An alternative POV is: the left has thrust us into a post-constitutional era in which there are no limits to government power. So do what they do and ignore the Constitution. Exercise brute political will and force the policy through. If courts balk, impeach the judges. If an appeal goes to SCOTUS, threaten to pack the court. Play by their rules.
Given my political philosophy, without an amendment (which would almost certainly not be ratified today) I personally couldn’t support this policy. It’s a matter for the states.
Arguing about labels and virtually-signaling doesn’t save babies. Also, Donald Trump specifically supports rape/incest exceptions, as does the majority of Americans and many pro-lifers, and Trump also said that “six week bans” were quote “HORRIBLE.” Know your audience! Pro-lifers already tried to convince him to support a restriction and he said NO!
Nobody’s saying the baby conceived in rape “deserves” the death penalty. But the 99.5% of the rest of those aborted babies do not deserve to be given up on and shipped to the slaughterhouse just because a minority of Americans insist on getting in the way of a raped woman’s desire to escape from whatever suffering that her pregnancy is causing her. No federal legislator is going to support a full ban.
This position did NOT devalue or authorize abortion for merely “disabled” babies. It did offer a whole list of concessions in support of disabled babies. It also does NOT authorize Medi-caid for elective abortions against merely “disabled” babies or healthy babies conceived in rape.
And then you try to DARVO me by claiming I’m trying to put a gun at YOU… to protect life, and protecting life is “getting what THEY want”? I thought life was what WE wanted as, you know, pro-LIFERS, and it’s what the baby wanted, you know, the baby’s right to LIFE?
Pro-life means trying to save as many babies as we CAN, not just shout at the unfortunate reality of politics. If you’re willing to hold 99.5% of viable unborn babies hostage, just to stand in the way of a rape victim’s desperate desire for an abortion, or just because you want to force excessive medical costs on disabled children’s families, you are COMPLICIT in the genocide of the 99.5% of aborted babies that you COULD have saved. As long as it’s all-or-nothing, then nothing is what you will get. I’m not here to fight for nothing. I’m here for solutions.
All prolifers believe life begins at conception no dispute. But there are instances where the pregnancy presents a real threat to life. As in if she continues the pregnancy she will die things such as ectopic pregnancy as a example. Ectopic pregnancies will never survive to any thing even close to viability. Also miscarriages when the child has already died. There are other such deadly pregnancies as well. Examples would include a child who is very young where they are physically not capable and continuing the pregnancy would result in death for both. Again these things are not ACTUALLY instances where abortion is a treatment. How ever do to 50 years of the abortion lobby spending massive sums of money to create the term spontaneous abortion and conflating abortion and treatment for dangerous pregnancy we are forced to use exceptions. Making sure that medical professionals can be held accountable for not treating such conditions is proper and required. No prolifer who is a doctor would ever refuse to treat a dangerous pregnancy to begin with. In fact only a abortionist would refuse to treat in the hopes of causing harm that they could then say “see what your prolife laws have done?” We have already seen numerous instances of exactly this texas and several other states have had this happen. These so called doctors need to be held accountable and they need to pay heavy penalties including fines and prison time as well as revoking their license to practice for ever. This would never effect a prolife doctor nor a religious doctor as nither would ever not provide life saving care.
***I have now made small edits to make sure it is 100% clear that this bill does NOT authorize funding for elective abortions; it does NOT compel medically providers and professionals to perform elective abortions. A few pro-lifers took issue with the terminology of “abortion” as many pro-lifers do not consider life-saving/medically indicated abortion to be abortion, so they misconstrued the purpose of my proposal. A medically indicated D & C is not always considered “abortion” by some state laws. Either way, regardless of my language choice, the stipulations in question only affirms and strengthens existing law that medical providers are obligated to stabilize their patients and avoid medical neglect/malpractice.
It does NOT provide exceptions for mere disabilities or conditions like Down Syndrome. I would consider conditions like anencephaly to be a “severe” abnormality, or if the baby was “chronically and irreversibly comatose”–cases in which the US Child Abuse Prevention Act specifies would not be “medically indicated” for treatment.
The Infant with Anencephaly | New England Journal of Medicine (nejm.org) End-of-Life Decision Making for Unborn and Newborn Infants | Carlton Fields
Vegetative State: Diagnosis, Symptoms, Treatment & More (healthline.com)
I have also been careful to point out that my idea for a Medi-caid/insurance co-pay funded in-home visits from an independently contracted parenting coach, is for a LIMITED number of visits. It could just be one or two. But either way, this would have to be fleshed out by the legislators. I don’t know how many visits it would be but the legislators could cross that bridge when we get there. This is absolutely health-related. This helps the parents’ mental health, and the improvement in their parenting and relationships will also improve their children’s mental outcome, and everyone’s overall health outcomes.
I just returned to this policy because I was notified of a reply to my comment. I applaud your attempts to communicate with someone who is adamant that this is a black-and-white issue rather than acknowledging the gray area. It’s a pity when Multiple Perspective Problem Framing is hindered and people try to utilize specific perspectives/outcomes to justify their reason for ignoring some perspectives. I still believe you’ve outlined a good foundation that protects life from abortion as a means of contraception.
I don’t think we read the same post. Tax dollars would only be going to life-saving operations, rather than elective abortions. If my tax dollars aren’t going to save the lives of American citizens, what the hell am I paying taxes for?
Edit: It appears that we actually didn’t read the same post, lol. The version I read was edited for this point to be clearer in the original, so that’s the likely result of this misunderstanding.
I think it was pretty clear before, though, about what I meant. At one point I even had the terms “medically necessarily” and “life-saving” splattered around the whole paragraph.
Well said…and may I add that if I’m honest, I have struggled with the rape/incest aspect against the “It’s not the baby’s fault” as I agree…it’s NOT the baby’s fault, but your PTSD analogy does gives me a different perspective to consider. Thank you for that, Brandi.
Well stated and I appreciate the level of thought put into your proposal. I have always struggled with the “Its not the baby’s fault, so let not punish the baby” b/c I agree that the baby is a victim a swell. With that said a post by someone (brandiw) made a great point re: a veteran and PTSD that has at least given me pause to consider a different perspective. I do believe you have one of the best compromised drafts that I’ve seen on this topic. Thank you for your ideas. I think you are extremely close. I wish this website existed a long time ago…ordinary people (like you) really do have some good ideas.
Should the government limit abortions? Well, my general view on this boils down to one key thing. The government should not be able to force you to use your body to sustain another life form. The government cannot force you to donate an organ, even if you are dead, without a clear legal statement beforehand. If someone needs a kidney transplant, and you just so happen to be compatible, you can choose to donate a kidney, but the government has no authority to come in and take your kidney and give it to another person. Even if it could be painlessly, non-invasively removed, and given back to you/regrown the very next day, the government does not have the power to govern how your body should be used to sustain something else.
Incredible, incredible post! This is a very difficult ground to find balance in, and there’s a lot of gray area that the vast majority of people ignore. It’s rare to see such a nuanced, well-researched, and logical take, so I applaud you for making such an intelligent post.
Now, the vast majority of the people in this thread (and on the site as a whole, I’d say) are pro-life, and lean to the right to various degrees. I am pro-choice, leaning to the left, so I feel like it might be good to chime in and just get a wider variety of opinions on here. Always healthy for civil discourse, in my opinion.
Now, this post deals with the cards we’ve been dealt. We are living in a society with a large variety of different people, and the goal of the government is to provide for the population as well as possible, and states’ rights are a big part of that. But I guess I’ll just outline my general thoughts on the abortion topic here, kind of ignoring reality and just going at it from an ideological standpoint for a bit.
A non-viable fetus, by definition, is being sustained by a mother. A viable fetus is too, but the difference is that it can be removed, so while it is currently being sustained by the mother, it does not NEED to be. The non-viable fetus needs the mother’s body to survive. Therefore, I don’t think the government should be able to tell the mother that she must continue doing this. No matter what state she lives in. She is giving her energy and her life to sustain another, and I think that is something the government ought to have no involvement in.
Now, we can also discuss the argument of abortion being wrong morally too. Is killing inherently wrong? Maybe, but most people are fine with all sorts of other killings. Hunting innocent animals, pulling the plug on a braindead life support patient, the death penalty, self defense killing. Even retaliation killings are generally supported. The vast majority of Americans supported going to war in Afghanistan after 9/11. And I’m not here to criticize any of these things or place my points in how we ought to feel about them. That isn’t the main idea here. I’m just saying that we like to paint these vast moral black-and-white pictures when it isn’t often so simple. There’s a lot of gray area here, and even the question of “is this wrong” is far simpler than the question of “should this be illegal?”
We have these knee-jerk reactions and say things like “If abortion is wrong (it is) then it’s wrong in all circumstances” without pausing and considering the WHY. Even the most obvious statements have a lot of room to think about the reasonings. It is very important to assess and analyze your own beliefs, as you might learn a lot about yourself, and come out of it with a much more nuanced and developed worldview.
Now, back to the real world. I can talk as much as I want about “this should be this way” and “this should be that way” but this post is talking about the 2024 election and policies in the USA. We have to consider a lot more than just these abstract moral grounds. There are real lives, real people, and a whole country filled with diverse cultures, loosely cobbled together, and threatening to fall apart more than ever.
As I agree with the general ideas presented here, and me going “uh huh yep that’s good” is useless, I’ll get a little bit nitpicky on the finer details I disagree with.
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Re: Doctors waiting until “Death’s door”.
I’m not sure why you call these claims false. In a later section, you acknowledge the necessity of laws that protect women from medical malpractice, as doctors or institutions afraid of litigation will often refuse to carry out a life-saving procedure. Even is the risk is high, something is clearly wrong, they will sometimes turn the patient away, writing the symptoms off as merely symptoms of pregnancy even when they clearly aren’t. Then eventually, after the patient keeps on coming back and symptoms keep progressing, the danger becomes imminent and overwhelmingly obvious, and the operation is finally carried out. Sometimes, the operation is never carried out at all, or it’s too late, and it results in the death of the patient or some permanent life alteration. Women have lost the ability to have children due to this. Talking about how much this happens, how much of an issue it is, that’s one thing, but to label the claims that doctors are waiting until symptoms become an imminent threat as persistently false is another. Ultimately, we arrive at the same conclusion anyway, which is that the inevitability, rather than the imminence, is the key quality of the danger, but I’m just not sure why you added that part in the parenthesis. -
Re: Comprehensive Reporting of Pregnancy Outcomes
How comprehensive do we mean here? Mostly just want to avoid violating patient confidentiality here. Already not a fan of the whole surveillance state thing. -
Re: Doctors Must Explain Decision in Writing
Like stated previously, I don’t think the main problem is that doctors are saying “yeah your life’s in danger but legally I can’t do anything” and then just throw their arms up in the air. There’s more often just an increased apprehension of litigation, which causes them to lean more towards “yeah dude everything is fine, don’t worry”. This is already an issue that happens in healthcare a lot, where doctors ignore symptoms and just send a patient home with some Tylenol. The problem with this law is that, while I agree with the sentiment, I think the problem itself would slip through the cracks, as the doctors who are refusing medically necessary care don’t usually say they are, they just insist that everything is fine, which wouldn’t necessitate a write-up in this scenario. -
Re: Abortion Pills
Mandating they be given in person is fine if you live in an urban area where you can clock off, drive 10 minutes to your healthcare provider, and come back a couple days later when you get your results. This is not the case for many Americans who live in more rural areas. It’s not so much that I’m against the idea itself, but I’m just wary of the unintentional side effects that would predominantly harm more rural Americans. People having to wait longer puts them further along in the gestational period, which isn’t ideal. A big reason for 20+ week abortions is that they simply didn’t have access earlier on, so the logic follows that increasing access to earlier abortion (through means like pills) decreases the amount of later abortions. As someone who isn’t fond of later abortions, I’m generally very pro-abortion-pill. (Not that I’m a huge abortion fan in the first place, but again, trying to balance outcomes here.) -
Re: High School Awareness Class
“Non-ideological, independently contracted source” is a tough thing to define. We can’t really mandate that the teachers themselves are non-ideological, as every person has ideas and opinions, so instead we must look at the curriculum. I think it’s much cheaper and more realistic to let the schools themselves handle the teaching, but standardize the curriculum itself to ensure that it is conveying accurate and non-biased information. I think including this in a unit in health classes, which most students already take, is a very realistic and easy goal. We obviously must treat it with more due diligence than teaching multiplication, so perhaps some form of inspection can occur to ensure content is being taught properly.
There’s a couple other things that stood out to me, but this wasn’t really the thread for it. For example, our adoption system has a lot of issues that don’t really fit within the scope of this post, but removing financial barriers for screened families IS a good step. It’s just far from the only one.
- Re: >20 Week Abortion Reasons
In your fact sheet, your main source (I say main because the majority of your sources for this datum are getting their info from this primary survey) for the claim that later abortions are generally not for medical reasons is from the Turnaway Study, specifically a smaller subset of 272 women who were seeking abortions at or after 20 weeks. It is important to note that this study does also demonstrate my previous point; the vast majority of the women seeking later abortions in this study had faced delays, and a decent way to tackle later abortions is to eliminate these delays (increase access to earlier abortions). Now, for these numbers themselves, there is a very important confounding factor: these women were approached and surveyed at abortion facilities. If they were presenting with life-threatening symptoms, they would most likely end up at a hospital. So, this survey’s sampling bias will lead to less women surveyed who were part of the “medical necessity” crowd. The other bias here is that these women were surveyed at 16 sites that had gestation limits beyond 20 weeks. What is not specified is HOW far beyond 20 weeks (although I suspect this information might be available in the original Turnaway Study, it doesn’t appear to be available in the analyses cited here.) These sites still had limits, and therefore, the majority of these women were still relatively close to the 20 week mark and within the 2nd trimester. This limitation of the study is acknowledged in a correction by the authors of one of these analyses you cited. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1363/psrh.12114
“One sentence on page 210 in the introduction of the article has been misinterpreted. We say “data suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” The sentence is about abortions performed from 20 weeks to the end of the second trimester, and it has no relevance to abortions in the third trimester. Only about one percent of abortions occur in the second half of pregnancy (at or beyond 20 weeks) and the vast majority of these occur close to 20 weeks. Our article, which focuses on women seeking abortions from 20 weeks to the end of the second trimester (about 28 weeks), therefore captures most of the women having abortions after 20 weeks. Little is known about the relatively few abortions occurring in the third trimester, although late detection of fetal anomaly and increasing incidence of maternal health complications with advanced gestation suggest that reasons for abortion in the third trimester may differ from those in the second.”
(As an unfortunate side note, MAHA is one of those things that once you see, you can’t unsee. Even in the abortion debate, I am reminded of how chronically ill our nation is becoming. Fixing the health crisis will certainly help to reduce 3rd trimester abortions.)
Again, the things I’ve brought up pale in comparison to the breadth of this massive topic, and I think your policies here would be very beneficial overall. Thank you for such a thoughtful and compelling post in a topic so plagued by tribalism.
Well done! You certainly have done your research and are proposing well thought out ideas. I support your approach and hope a true unbiased dialog can occur on this important issue.
I applaud your extensive efforts in research and your experience with the topic of abortion, especially coming from a super blue state of California where abortion “rights” are being wrongly exploited to late term. I personally am pro-life with the big 3 exceptions (rape, incest, mother’s health) and one more personal exception because I would like children of my own without extreme disability one day. I absolutely think there is a reasonable middle ground for all pro-life and pro-choice people that uses common sense, and not the extreme one way or the other that the radicals of each side of the political spectrum support. You have earned my vote on your topic, not only because I support the topic directly, but also because of the part where you mention that if we get this stupid issue out of the way, we can shift the focus to the REAL issues affecting Americans every day, unlike abortion. Thank you for your hard work and best of luck with your proposal being reviewed by the Trump/Vance/RFK admin!
I can never support this.
What we all ought to support is the simple, formal recognition - in legislation - that human life begins at conception. This is provable, demonstrable, testable, and verifiable - scientifically - so there really shouldn’t be any dispute about that fact.
If our laws recognize unborn human beings as human beings, then all murder laws immediately apply, and abortion will be - rightfully - abolished as the murderous act it is.
The Child Protection Act - Liberty - Policies for the People (policiesforpeople.com)
I endorse RealQualityGuy’s idea for the “Child Protection Act.” People should read it and consider it.
You should also check out a similar position that someone else made. Equal Protection
Thank you for your thorough analysis. A few quick responses:
-Regarding your hypothetical of doctors telling women that they are in danger, but still delaying treatment…. Yes those stories are literally happening across the country. In fact, Amanda Zurawski’s story was exactly that. And the media, abortion industry & Democrats literally and falsely claim that the pro-life laws criminalized pregnancy emergency care. For example, Harris just told Oprah that the pro-life laws are forcing doctor’s to wait until she is at “Death’s door.” That’s where I got their phrase “death’s door.”
-Regardless of whether you believe the propaganda, the public perception is so strong, it has to be addressed definitively one way or another. The misinformation is killing women, including those two women from Georgia. I have binge-researched these stories, and when you look deeply into all of their top examples, the law was crystal clear that it had NOTHING TO DO WITH THOSE CASES. Courts, lawyers and OB-GYN’s have repeatedly affirmed that the pro-life laws do not require “imminence.” So, we need a federal exception law with TEETH to enforce the medical exemptions.
-Please read the attached google doc from my OP called “Treatment delays for pregnant women in red states.” There I summarize all my findings and all my links/screenshots. Read all about it.
-You incorrectly claimed that my basis for claiming that the majority of late term abortions were elective, that supposedly my basis was entirely based on 1-2 links? NO. I have an entire collection of sources/links about late term abortion in page five of my main, super-detailed Abortion Factsheet (again, that link can be found in my one-pager “top 16 discoveries” doc).
—While I fundamentally disagree with your “pro-choice” belief that mothers aren’t responsible for their unborn children’s care, regardless, this bill does not ban terminating pregnancy at any time, and therefore would not violate your concept of “bodily autonomy.”
-Re: data reporting. No, this has nothing to do with the patients’ private data. Examples of legislative ideas are included in my third google doc about Detailed Federal Legislative Ideas. Example One: states are NOT required to report how many abortions occur. That includes California. Example Two: I explained on pages 12-18 of my super-detailed factsheet why the Maternal Mortality rate is wildly, absurdly erroneous and hyper-inflated… There are other examples. So we do NOT have any fully reliable data to inform any debate on this issue.
-re: in person abortion pills. The people being harmed are unborn children. No one has a right to kill their child at any stage in the first place. Rural people aren’t banned from going to hospitals. And women still need an ultrasound to get proper pregnancy and abortion care. I’m not personally opposed to pharmacies dispensing the pill to women who have a prescription (although pro-life organizations often are.). Some women either hold on to the pills and take them later than prescribed. And sometimes people poison pregnant women and kill someone else’s baby. I can see why pro-choice people would oppose a restriction against the way abortion pills because you don’t like that state’s abortion ban to begin with. People disagree on that because our priorities differ.
-re: teachers for an awareness class. I would NEVER want a district teacher to do it. No way. They are all ideologically captured. I would suggest that the instructor be independent from the school system, and cannot be an employee for any ideological based association like Planned Parenthood or a church. I suggest that there be a process of choosing instructors to help ensure accuracy and completeness of such a course.