I find this kind of dribble very one sided and silly. Another case of an article which ignores the reality that women and men hold similar views for and against abortion. Framing the argument as a “feminist” argument is simply a lie. As gender surveys do not support the assertion. And so any subsequent arguments that they make are simply attempts to assert as true something that is not true.

The abortion issue is one of many related issues that revolve around balancing someone’s unalienable right to life afforded to it by our laws and someone’s right to privacy or other rights. No one denies women have “rights” in this debate, but its time for honesty, and honesty demand acknowledging the baby at some point has rights also.

I have met very few people who say, I wish I was aborted rather than born. So we kind of know where the baby’s feelings are on the issue. And the baby has rights and can expect that the government will protect their rights in the same manner as the government protects people in a coma from physical abuse or murder. The inability to express one’s desires does not absolve the government from protecting a person’s rights.

So the question in abortion from a legal perspective has always been simple… when does a baby accrue citizenship rights… at that point, the baby’s rights including its right to life will trump the woman’s right to privacy. This conclusion does not apply just to abortion, but is pretty pervasive in our laws.

If a stranger steals something from you (your property rights are violated), you do not have the right to end that stranger’s life, but like abortion, if that stranger poses a real threat to your life, then you do. So a burglar’s right to life trumps a person’s property rights which is where people’s right to their own bodies are derived (your body is your property).

When does a police officer have the right to take a person’s life in the act of enforcing the law? The issue about “life taking” is pervasive in our laws and in general the laws are evolving to place more and more limitation on the right to “take a life”. The only reason that consistently trumps that “right to life” is a legitimate fear that you are threatening someone else’s right to life as part of an illegal action.

So extending this thought process to abortion leads to the conclusion the Court made in Roe vs Wade, once the baby has citizen rights, the mother can no longer decide to end its life without the mother’s life being a risk (justifiable fear) or the baby’s health establishes that it won’t ever be viable outside the womb (the argument for turning off the “machines” that keep people alive when no hope of recovery exists). There are some other exceptions that are very specific like rape and incest, but these exceptions do not pose a threat to our legal system as a whole as they are narrowly defined events and so are not likely to establish an inconsistent precedence.

All this nonsense about society’s failure to provide adequate post birth entitlements and such is “noise”. Those are real societal issues, but not relevant to the right to take a life. Do I have a right to kill a criminal if we don’t want to incur the cost of housing them? It simply does not work that way. Poor prison facilities don’t form the basis for the death penalty.

So the Court has a simple decision to make, which is what Roe vs Wade was all about, when does the unborn baby secure its citizenship rights. The various “heartbeat laws” are attempts to revise that date. They don’t deny Roe vs Wade, they affirm Roe vs Wade, which also said the Supreme Court established the “viability” standard in the absence of legislation determining a different date. So states are now passing such legislation.

There are many good reasons to re-visit Roe vs Wade related to the improvement in medical technology and what we have learned in the biological sciences. While I think viability will remain the standard short term, longer term I expect cognitive development in conjunction with viability to be the factors that determine where the legal abortion window will exist.

But for now people will yell and scream at one another using arguments that simply are not relevant to how the decision will need to be rendered. In the end the arguments that will prevail will be those that are not unique to abortion, but form a consistent basis for evaluating other conflicts between the right to life and other legal rights.

Now not to throw some fuel on the fire, I believe the Supreme Court will find whatever it concludes as the basis for citizenship rights being applied to immigration. What?

If every biological human is entitled to citizenship rights at conception, then it will be hard to deny immigrants certain legal rights as soon as they present in this country.

However, citizenship rights are arbitrarily determined by government based on “popular” opinion, then we have no unalienable rights, simply rights that can be given and taken away by government. Again my sense is deep down most people do not trust the government to be “fair” and so would prefer things like the Bill of Rights that limit government, while at the same time recognizing that when competing rights conflict, government should have a consistent standard to resolve those differences…