I encourage people to match my donations to two groups that are fighting to protect womens access to safe abortions.
The first group is Kansans for Constitutional Freedom which is the first opportunity for voters in a post-Dobbs context to affirm abortion rights at the ballot box. A No vote upholds their state supreme courts decision reading abortion rights into the states equal protection clause. A Yes vote will add a new amendment banning the procedure with few of any exceptions. I am giving them $25/weekly until the Aug 2 primary. Feel free to match. A victory here in a deeply red state would be a huge victory for the pro-choice movement as well as protecting Kansans from unsafe abortions.
The second group is the Eastern Massachusetts Abortion Fund. I have become a monthly donor. My monthly donation will help cover safe abortions for any low income woman using a clinic in Eastern Massachusetts, regardless of what state she is coming from.
Like some of you, I am also an ACLU member and Planned Parenthood donor, and I encourage you to still support those groups as well which are fighting in the courts as we speak to preserve these rights. I also think we have to be ready to beat or overturn these bans at the ballot box and cover women seeking safe abortions in our midst. Feel free to share these links with your offsite friends and family.
You really have done a 180 on this issue! The jconway we first met described himself as prolife.
I had always been personally against abortion while remaining pro-choice on Roe, but I definitely was in favor of more restrictions and a lot more vocal in my moral opposition than I am now. If anything, I’m not even sure I have a moral opposition anymore.
Heh — funny how a decade or so of real-life experience shapes us.
I was in favor of capital punishment in my youth. My stance on that “evolved” during the 1990s.
In some sense, my evolution in matters of morality and ethics moves alongside my lifelong spiritual journey (perhaps unsurprisingly).
In my view, the world would be a better place if our spiritual and religious institutions were rather more like science — intentionally adjusting moral and ethical guidance as lived experience and data reveals the universe to us.
As a scientist and mathematician (not to mention engineer), I have learned that paying attention to the consequences — intended and unintended — of our beliefs and actions is an absolute requirement.
From a philosophical perspective, this amounts to valuing inductive (what are the implications of a given set of premises) as well as deductive (what are the simplest explanations for some collection of datapoints).
The world is chock-full of situations where “common sense” — and in too many cases, explicit religious belief — leads us to an outcome that is plainly and clearly incorrect.
A dirt-simple example is a hill-climbing algorithm that says “always choose the path that climbs”. That algorithm will strand whatever is following it at the summit of a tiny foothill — leaving the neighboring mountaintop unattainable.
I am perhaps more disturbed by the apparent eagerness of the Supreme Court to strike down the last vestiges of church and state separation than any of the other disasters of the past week or so.
Unless and until we find a way to reign in today’s Supreme Court, we remain in a death spiral for the America that all of us hold dear.
The old joke is that a conservative is a liberal mugged by reality, and to some extent that has been my own journey on other issues like policing, identity politics, education, foreign policy,, and some economic questions like trade or tariffs where I have definitely moved to the “right” or at least to the center from a formerly left wing spot.
Yet in many ways my stronger and unambiguous pro choice position on abortion is the result of being mugged by reality. The reality that I have many friends and relatives who have been assaulted, who have had entoptic pregnancies that needed to be terminated for their health, and having students graduating from high school who’s parents are my age and who vow never to have kids that young.
So the freedom of choice is really a pragmatic and small c conservative acceptance of the reality that individuals and not big government should be making these important personal decisions. That this huge policy change only makes unsafe underground abortions in the states that have bans, it does not reduce or eliminate the need at all. If anything the need may be even higher in these states which also have much thinner safety nets.
I also agree that strengthening the separation of church and state is more critical today than at any period in our history since maybe Prohibition. Especially since the religious right has moved beyond the moral majority days to a Christian nationalist illiberal minority with legal theories like integralism which are openly unconstitutional.
I say this as someone who’s Christian faith has been both tested and strengthened by the events of this pandemic. The need for people to work together for the common good has never been greater. I think my secular generation has become too focused on its own needs and self gratification in the matrix rather than that of the commonweal in real life. But while my faith has never been stronger my faith in the institutional church has never been lower.
My brother who’s a lapsed evangelical, my wife who is a lapsed mainliner, and myself who has sort of lapsed in my Catholicism all agreed the other day that it’s embarrassing to call ourselves Christians these days. My brothers preferred term is “follower of Jesus” which reminded me of that apocryphal Gandhi quote.
So in some ways it’s by following Jesus that I am engaging in this direct action of subsidizing abortion for poor women and the fight in Kansas. Something Christopher is right to point out my prior conception of the issue would never have countenanced. Precisely since they are the ones most in need right now and the ones he would be called to comfort and assist if he were with us today.
On most issues the more I learn, the more left I drift, and that includes what I learn about what the Bible actually says!
Yeah apparently the only time something remotely similar to abortion is mentioned is in Exodus it is quite clear that harming the mother carried more weight than harming the fetus. Otherwise the religious grounding is all relatively recent. Hippocrates has instructions on how to perform an abortion, Augustine and Aquinas both disfavored it after “quickening” which is (unscientific) and roughly close to the 15-20 week mark. It was really only after the church proscribed birth control after nearly allowing it in the heady Vatican II days that the life begins at conception framework became papal Bull and only part of the catechism when JPII revised it in the 1980’s.
Now of course none of this should matter in a republic that explicitly bans church interference in state affairs in its constitution, but the importance of this issue to religious people is relatively recent and somewhat alien to early Christianity.
https://biblia.com/bible/nasb95/Exod%2021.22%E2%80%9325
Although I believe the Hippocratic Oath includes a line promising not to administer an abortifacient.
I remember writing a paper for my college Intro to History of Philosophy and Science class contrasting the original Hippocratic Oath with the Lasagna Oath (named after a Tufts University medical school professor and not the delicious dish) focusing on how the original oath did prohibit abortion but the latter oath was deliberately vague on the subject.
Also paradoxically the writings of Hippocrates (likely a series of different individuals operating under the same pseudonym) also included herbal remedies for abortions. It is also well known that the ancient Egyptians were also pioneers in the field of herbal contraception and abortifacients. So this long tradition Alito refers to of proscribing abortion has also been held in tandem with a long tradition of prescribing it.
I could have fun writing a Lasagna Oath named after the pasta dish!
Of course lots of explicit stuff about giving away your property, praying in private, rich people not getting into heaven, healing the sick ‘o matter the cost, etc. but the tax cuts and abortion ban crowd doesn’t seem to remember those parts of the Bible.
Capital punishment is another issue where I once had stridently pro life moral views and now am ambivalent. As a practical matter, I remain opposed to it in its current form since it is mostly arbitrary, barbaric, and racist. It is also expensive and does nothing to deter crime. I would not support reinstating it in Massachusetts.
That said, I have no moral opposition to putting a racist mass murderer like Dylan Root to death.
If we could design a system where folks like him are executed but nobody else is, that would be ideal. Alas, I think such a system is largely unworkable in our country.
I only support it for mass murderers and when there is no question of guilt. Almost every example of someone to whom my standard applies is white.
I don’t see how killing a killer accomplishes anything positive.
A killer who is already jailed does not present a threat to society.
In my view, our belief in the sanctity of human life implies that capital punishment is anathema.
I favor the Japanese approach to the death penalty where it is limited to those who kill 3 or more individuals and with automatic appeals to the Supreme Court. It is done by hanging which remains the quickest and least prone to error way to execute an inmate. The death chamber has a very zen design.
As an aside I also like that their Supreme Court has a ten year term limit followed by a retention election or 70 year retirement age, whichever happens first. The recent custom has been to appoint justices who are in their early 60’s to avoid a retention election. It has 14 associate justices with the chief acting as a tie breaker (appointed by the Emperor with no possibility of a retention election but still subject to mandatory retirement) and mostly they sit in teams or five to decide most cases and only sit as a full court for extraordinary cases.
“Overturning Roe was an exercise in raw political power…We face a choice between the mainstream and the extreme.” President Biden signing Executive Order 7/8/22
In the 50 years since Roe was decided, was it possible for members of congress to codify abortion? I’m not trying to pick a fight here, just wondering about missed opportunities and a path to the future. If congress were to have passed, say, a body autonomy law in 1993, staging that all medical procedures decided by an individual of legal age and their licensed medical care provider in matters pertaining to and only to that individual recognized by law, are private and outside of the jurisdiction of any local, state, or federal government…….would Roe even matter?
There were, I believe, multiple opportunities to codify Roe, but the pro-choice side just hid behind the case and insisted it was just as sacrosanct as rights actually enumerated in the Constitution. I’m pro-choice on the merits, but as a loose constructionist have long questioned the jurisprudence of “emanations and penumbras”. OTOH, the pro-choice side wailed with every new conservative justice that Roe was in imminent danger, but when it survived so long that began to sound like crying wolf. The Right has definitely won this round of playing the long game; would that the Left do a better job keeping their eyes on the prize.