Thank you for letting us know your own views! This is all very clear and well written.
I think my major issue with this is, the status quo established by Roe vs. Wade WAS the compromise. This is an age-old political tactic – two parties come to a compromise and meet in the middle, then one of those parties takes a huge step back and says “why aren’t you meeting me in the middle anymore?” This to me feels like bad-faith diplomacy. It’s the “golden mean” fallacy writ large.
I don’t think they compromised here in good faith whatsoever. Again, a woman only has TWO WEEKS to miss her menstrual cycle, get a pregnancy test, confirm she is pregnant, make an informed decision about what to do next, and schedule an appointment, hoping one is available in time.
The goal here, I think, was to get as close to a “ban” as they possibly could without having to call it a “ban”. This really isn’t a compromise at all. And what’s worse, it’s clear from Abbott’s statements that the legislators either did not know that the six weeks begins at the beginning of a woman’s last menstrual cycle (which would make them incompetent/illiterate), or they did know and are pretending that a woman actually does have a full six weeks after conceiving or confirming she is pregnant (which would make them malicious).
And not including any exceptions whatsoever for rape, incest, or unviable/stillborn pregnancies seems intentionally cruel, from a purely humanitarian perspective.
Not to mention the vigilante justice system that they created, whereby ordinary citizens are deputized and have a financial incentive to ‘rat out’ their friends, family, and neighbors. Again, I feel bad for every woman who will experience a spontaneous abortion (which occurs in 1 out of 8 pregnancies), and who will then be looked at with suspicion and maybe even opportunism by the rest of her community. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this, because as far as I can tell, this effectively breaks the standards and principles of “justice” that we have evolved and sustained over the last couple centuries. If I see you hit someone else’s car on the highway, I have no right to sue you just because I was a witness to this event. If we follow this precedent to its natural conclusion, then anyone can sue anyone for any perceived transgression, regardless of whether the plaintiff was actually affected by the defendant one way or the other.
Knowing that middle-class and upper-class women still have the option of easily ignoring the mandate by simply hopping on a plane and flying to a different state, I suppose my short-term hope is that some pool of resources are made available for lower-class women to have the same opportunity.
I fully agree with your final paragraph, by the way. It takes us back to that old Winston Churchill chestnut: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”. And of course, we also have to consider Plato’s warning: “the true navigator must study the seasons of the year, the sky, the stars, the winds, and all the other subjects appropriate to his profession if he is to be really fit to control the ship…[the electorate] think that it’s quite impossible to acquire the professional skill needed for such control and that there’s no such thing as the art of navigation.”
Personally, I just hope that our pendulum still has enough swing remaining in order to recover from this new set of regressive (relative to the previous status quo) policies that are being enacted.
Thanks again for sharing @FermentedAgave!
