NoWings

There is an anti-abortion movement seeking an overturn of Roe v Wade, Webster, Casey, and other Supreme Court decisions or to pass federal legislation banning abortion or asserting the personhood of zygotes or at least embryos to assist the banning of abortion. In the last year and a half, over 1,000 bills against abortion or seeking to regulate abortion more strictly in order to lower access to abortion have been introduced all over the US at state and federal levels. In this context, pro-choice people, including those people who call themselves pro-life but believe that abortion should remain legal, are attempting to defend the legally recognized US Constitutional right of girls and women to privacy that extends far enough that they can choose whether or not to continue or terminate their own pregnancies.

I myself, like many millions of pro-choice people, believe that it is very important for all girls and women in the US that this constitutional right continue to be recognized and extended that far. It is not only important for those who may wish to terminate their pregnancies, but also for those who do not. It is part of the basic package of constitutional rights of persons in this country that they have the right to control the state and behavior of their own bodies, particularly in the interests of one's own health, well-being, and chosen work, according to their own consciences. It is not clear to me how one could be an equal participant in democratic society in a meaningful way without this right.

Zygotes, morulae, blastocysts, embryos, and fetuses are not persons and do not, before viability, even have the capacity to live apart from the women who carry them and upon whose bodies they parasitically live. I do not think they should be accorded some right to live parasitically on women who are persons and thus to interfere with the women's own constitutional rights as persons. It is demeaning and insulting to women to give these entities the right to live as biological parasites at the expense of the women as genuine persons. It detracts from the personhood of women even as a theoretical or ideological statement. It ignores the fact that abortion restrictions with categorical exceptions insult the reasoned judgment of the women and can, at worst, fail to encompass certain cases in such ways as to result in medically unforeseeable death and major injury to those women.

I'm protecting the right to choose for women and girls in the US for as long as I am in the world. I think you should be asking why people think it is politically relevant in a democracy for people to try to use the law to control the bodies of persons in such as way as to make them die medically unforeseeable deaths, cause them to experience medically unforeseeable physical injury, disease, and disablement, force them to give up their rights as autonomous, self-supporting equals, force them to become biological mothers against their will, conscience, and freedom of religion, etc. Those people who are doing this are a menace to the responsible democratic citizenry in this nation.

choiceone

I think the abortion and homosexual issue's are put to the forefront by our news media to distract us from far more important issue's, such as the economy and unnecessary wars being instigated.

Originally Posted by 24107

I think the abortion and homosexual issue's are put to the forefront by our news media to distract us from far more important issue's, such as the economy and unnecessary wars being instigated.

There is no doubt that the right wing puts its anti-abortion and anti-gay agenda forward to appeal to the extreme far right, but I don't think it's distraction. The economic problems and wars were instigated by the same people that the extreme far right supports, and they supported almost everything - anti-abortion, anti-gay, Iraq was a just war and we should have stayed longer, and in spite of all the evidence, we should not have federal regulation of the finance industry and should think it's just wonderful that CEOs continually increase the pay of top management in their roles on boards of directors of companies while not increasing the pay of the working poor and middle class, etc. The extreme far right supports the whole package of idiocy.