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Carolyn Spence's avatar

You are a good woman Mary and it is very nice conversing with you.

I cannot disagree with you, and can even expand on your ideals. The fetus is the root of all human life; children are a true miracle that once held, opens up a much bigger world to the person holding it. We are made to instantly love & protect our young whether we bore them or not. In many ways procreation is the single most important and beautiful act that we can experience.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that nearly all women will regret an abortion for the rest of their lives; some will wish they had not done it, most would reason it was a necessity at the time, but nearly all will forever grieve the life gone.

But when we are talking about rights and the law, and all of the lessons learned over centuries that our framers attempted to instill in our founding documents, none of that forms the basis of how we apply the law and attempt to protect the individual rights of all. We have built a system of government that attempts to make no judgements based on assumptions of a person's character, or how their actions are motivated, without evidence. We have created degrees in the law, over thousands of years to try and differentiate from the boy who steals bread to feed his mother and the man that executes a long-game theft for riches and power. Over and over, we try to make our institutions better than we are as humans, to remove the biases & emotions, and to enforce judgement based on the law instead of how we feel. And so, the woman who chooses to not be pregnant at this time deserves the same basic rights and due process, free from emotion & bias & assumptions. She could be a young wreckless woman that makes a game of seeing how much unprotected sex she can have without pregnancy or disease, just for her personal amusement. Or she could be a 16yo whose parents have taught her little and kept her from school sex ed class. Or she could be a rape victim. Or just afraid of the men in her life. Or a woman with a devastating disease or handicap that still cobbles together a life & marriage. Maybe they try for a long time to get pregnant and don't but years later, after she is on tons of dangerous-to-fetus medications to stave off the disease progression, she does get pregnant but the outlook for carrying isn't good.

So is a baby's right to life greater than the rights of the first woman I described to live her life as she sees fit? It seems like it should be. But what about the others? If history has taught us anything as a society, it is that there will always be new cases, ideas, circumstances, norms. And so the law tries to focus on preserving basic rights. In order to protect the rights of a woman with a 'good' reason to end pregnancy, the law must protect the rights of all women who want to end pregnancy. This is why some states put no restrictions at all on abortion.

So the priciples in our founding documents require us as a society to not infringe on a woman's right through the law. But our morals force is to look out for the thumb-sucking sonagram, and that's ok. Be an activist, volunteer, spread the joy of life in any way you know how. But attempting to force women through the law contradicts our founding ideals that prize personal rights without goverment curtailment above all others. These long term efforts by groups like the Federalist Society are anethema to personal rights so prized in our founding. They smack of the desire to feel power through controlling women, to loudly proclaim "our way is the right way' and therefore I shall be the boss of you. Citizens such as yourself who truly want to look out for the unborn should remember that even though the Dobbs decision seems good because less unborn will be aborted, it comes with costs to both women and society. A lot of costs.

I only mentioned the idea of birth & adoption at viability as another way to compare the rights of the fetus versus mother. These seems a way to even out the treatment of those rights; if it still seems too risky, and your mind just wants all the babies to be carried to term, it may be that you value the rights of the woman as much less than that of the baby's. Coincidentally, I think that is how ACB feels. It's OK for you, but not ok for her, at least not when she is judge. If the thoughts of the baby trump that of the mother, we are not doing our country/constitution/founding principles they way it was intended.

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