• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Banning abortion after 20 weeks passed by the House

minnie616 said:
It is not concidered a murder of an unborn.


The feticide laws and or or the UVVA ( unborn victims of violence act ) recognize abortion is legal.

The law only takes affect if an unborn was killed during a crime against the pregnant woman.
When an unborn is killed during an attack on the woman feticide laws may be used against the attacker.
The attacker is charged with violating the feticide law or the UVVA.



Roe v Wade is a SC decision that held that state abortion laws violate the Due process clause in the fourteenth amendment,
which protects individuals against state action that infringes on their privacy.

The UVVA and state feticide laws passed under Roe vs Wade because it explicitly identified "abortion' is an activity that can't be prosecuted when the abortion is obtained with the consent of the pregnant woman or individual authorized to act on her behalf.
~~~~
The feticide laws apply only when a crime against the woman was made.


All state feticide laws have a clause specifing that nothing in the act shall make it a crime to perform or obtain an abortion that is otherwise legal.
~~~~
Click to expand...
Scott Peterson was tried and convicted of double homicide. Not one homicide and one feticide.
 
eman623 said:
...The Constitution doesn't explicitly state the unborn are not persons so it could have gone either way.
Click to expand...

The US has never counted an unborn as a person.

The US has a census every 10 every 10 years. Unborns are not counted during the census.
 
minnie616 said:
The US has never counted an unborn as a person.

The US has a census every 10 every 10 years. Unborns are not counted during the census.
Click to expand...
The law is mixed. There have been cases where pregnant women got off driving alone in a carpool lane.
 
"

What was the reasoning in Roe v. Wade? There was no legal weight given to what happens to the children once they are born, or to the family. Instead, a woman's right to reproductive freedom is protected, the court ruled, by constitutional guarantees of privacy. But that right is not unqualified. The woman's guarantee of privacy and the fetus's right to life must be weighed--and when the court did the weighing' priority was given to privacy in the first trimester and to life in the third. The transition was decided not from any of the considerations we have been dealing with so far…--not when "ensoulment" occurs, not when the fetus takes on sufficient human characteristics to be protected by laws against murder. Instead, the criterion adopted was whether the fetus could live outside the mother. This is called "viability" and depends in part on the ability to breathe. The lungs are simply not developed, and the fetus cannot breathe--no matter how advanced an artificial lung it might be placed in—until about the 24th week, near the start of the sixth month. This is why Roe v. Wade permits the states to prohibit abortions in the last trimester. It's a very pragmatic criterion.

If the fetus at a certain stage of gestation would be viable outside the womb, the argument goes, then the right of the fetus to life overrides the right of the woman to privacy. But just what does "viable" mean? Even a full-term newborn is not viable without a great deal of care and love. There was a time before incubators, only a few decades ago, when babies in their seventh month were unlikely to be viable. Would aborting in the seventh month have been permissible then? After the invention of incubators, did aborting pregnancies in the seventh month suddenly become immoral? What happens if, in the future, a new technology develops so that an artificial womb can sustain a fetus even before the sixth month by delivering oxygen and nutrients through the blood--as the mother does through the placenta and into the fetal blood system? We grant that this technology is unlikely to be developed soon or become available to many. But if it were available, does it then become immoral to abort earlier than the sixth month, when previously it was moral? A morality that depends on, and changes with, technology is a fragile morality; for some, it is also an unacceptable morality.

And why, exactly, should breathing (or kidney function, or the ability to resist disease) justify legal protection? If a fetus can be shown to think and feel but not be able to breathe, would it be all right to kill it? Do we value breathing more than thinking and feeling? Viability arguments cannot, it seems to us, coherently determine when abortions are permissible. Some other criterion is needed. Again, we offer for consideration the earliest onset of human thinking as that criterion.

Since, on average, fetal thinking occurs even later than fetal lung development, we find Roe v. Wade to be a good and prudent decision addressing a complex and difficult issue. With prohibitions on abortion in the last trimester--except in cases of grave medical necessity--it strikes a fair balance between the conflicting claims of freedom and life. "
Science and abortion
 
eman623 said:
Scott Peterson was tried and convicted of double homicide. Not one homicide and one feticide.
Click to expand...

Laci was over 8 months pregnant when she was killed.

California’s feticide law allowed a killer to be charged with second degree homicide of the unborn if the woman was over 8 months pregnant when the woman and her unborn were killed.

Homicide is the act of one human killing another
 
Last edited:
eman623 said:
The Constitution doesn't explicitly state the unborn are not persons so it could have gone either way.
Click to expand...
NEVERTHELESS, THERE IS ANOTHER FACTOR. See what the Constitution (and the 14th Amendment) have to say about the Census. Basically, every 10 years all persons must be counted (except for Indians not taxed). The Founding Fathers were right there in 1790 to specify the details of counting persons in the very first Census. You can see for yourself, here, the questions they asked, and all other formal Census questions since. Unborn humans have never been counted as persons in any Census --which constitutes a Legal Precedent far exceeding the Roe v Wade decision.

STILL WAITING for you to support the Positive Claim that unborn humans somehow qualify (or should qualify) as persons....
 
eman623 said:
Which is find with me. As I've noted before, I'd draw the line at personhood, which is an equally murky definition with no basis in the Constitution. Probably works out to the same thing more or less.
Click to expand...
"So, if only a person can be murdered, when does the fetus attain personhood? When its face becomes distinctly human, near the end of the first trimester? When the fetus becomes responsive to stimuli--again, at the end of the first trimester? When it becomes active enough to be felt as quickening, typically in the middle of the second trimester? When the lungs have reached a stage of development sufficient that the fetus might, just conceivably, be able to breathe on its own in the outside air?

The trouble with these particular developmental milestones is not just that they're arbitrary. More troubling is the fact that none of them involves uniquely human characteristics--apart from the superficial matter of facial appearance. All animals respond to stimuli and move of their own volition. Large numbers are able to breathe. But that doesn't stop us from slaughtering them by the billions. Reflexes and motion are not what make us human.

Other animals have advantages over us--in speed, strength, endurance, climbing or burrowing skills, camouflage, sight or smell or hearing, mastery of the air or water. Our one great advantage, the secret of our success, is thought--characteristically human thought. We are able to think things through, imagine events yet to occur, figure things out. That's how we invented agriculture and civilization. Thought is our blessing and our curse, and it makes us who we are.

Thinking occurs, of course, in the brain--principally in the top layers of the convoluted "gray matter" called the cerebral cortex. The roughly 100 billion neurons in the brain constitute the material basis of thought. The neurons are connected to each other, and their linkups play a major role in what we experience as thinking. But large-scale linking up of neurons doesn't begin until the 24th to 27th week of pregnancy--the sixth month.

By placing harmless electrodes on a subject's head, scientists can measure the electrical activity produced by the network of neurons inside the skull. Different kinds of mental activity show different kinds of brain waves. But brain waves with regular patterns typical of adult human brains do not appear in the fetus until about the 30th week of pregnancy--near the beginning of the third trimester. Fetuses younger than this--however alive and active they may be--lack the necessary brain architecture. They cannot yet think.

Acquiescing in the killing of any living creature, especially one that might later become a baby, is troublesome and painful. But we've rejected the extremes of "always" and "never," and this puts us--like it or not--on the slippery slope. If we are forced to choose a developmental criterion, then this is where we draw the line: when the beginning of characteristically human thinking becomes barely possible.

It is, in fact, a very conservative definition: Regular brain waves are rarely found in fetuses. More research would help… If we wanted to make the criterion still more stringent, to allow for occasional precocious fetal brain development, we might draw the line at six months. This, it so happens, is where the Supreme Court drew it in 1973--although for completely different reasons. "
Science and abortion
 
eman623 said:
Scott Peterson was tried and convicted of double homicide. Not one homicide and one feticide.
Click to expand...

From the Keeler vs Superior Court Case.

In this proceeding for writ of prohibition we are called upon to decide whether an unborn but viable fetus is a "human being" within the meaning of the California statute defining murder (Pen. Code, § 187). We conclude that the Legislature did not intend such a meaning, and that for us to construe the statute to the contrary and apply it to this petitioner would exceed our judicial power and deny petitioner due process of law.
Click to expand...

https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/3d/2/619.html
 
tecoyah said:
Science and abortion
Click to expand...
CHERRY-PICKED DATA IS OFTEN INADEQUATE. It is well-documented how various ordinary animals have more brain activity and brain-power than newborn humans (and thus also have more than any less-developed unborn human). Logically, anyone insisting that unborn humans qualify as persons because of brain-activity should be even-more-willing to insist that various ordinary animals also be declared persons. However, since persons tend to claim they are superior to ordinary animals, it even-more-logically follows that humans can, per the scientific data, only qualify as persons when their brainpower exceeds that of ordinary animals. Here is some data about that.

I NOW NOTE that the Law about assigning personhood at birth is rather arbitrary, and the original form of that Law was written long before there was any scientific data at all about personhood-in-general. Therefore anyone talking about personhood needs to make a distinction between the available scientific data and what the Law specifies (never confuse/conflate the two!). As it happens, it is known that some folks want the Law to be changed so that it becomes synchronized with the scientific data (thus legalizing infanticide) --and of course others want the Law to be made even-more-out-of-sync with the scientific data (thus banning abortion), like Fact-Denying Idiots. Due to such things as the existence and widespread acceptance of "grandfather clauses", I personally am quite fine with leaving the Law right where it is (at least regarding human persons).
 
eman623 said:
Scott Peterson was tried and convicted of double homicide. Not one homicide and one feticide.
Click to expand...

There are 2 counts because of California's fetal homicide statute, any fetus -- meaning eight weeks of development and onward -- is considered an equal victim.

https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/15/us/scott-peterson-trial-fast-facts/index.html
Click to expand...

THe unborn was considered a victim, not a person. And CA was able to use judicial discretion...even called 'special circumstances...for that charge.

At no time was the unborn considered a person nor having any rights.

And still no answers to this?

What legal basis would you offer SCOTUS to recognize rights for the unborn and thus reduce women back to 2nd class citizens? And how would you justify that treatment of women, violating our rights in order to give the exact same things: self-determination and a future to the unborn instead?"
 
eman623 said:
The law is mixed. There have been cases where pregnant women got off driving alone in a carpool lane.
Click to expand...

Sooo....off on a tangent then?

We have pretty much given you plenty of proof that the unborn are not persons and never considered persons legally. You have offered an "opinion" that you disagree. You have not supported that opinion with any workable or practical legal solutions that could be considered under the Constitution.
 
eman623 said:
And yet Scott was convicted of not 1 but 2 murders.
Click to expand...

No. He was convicted of first degree murder for Laci and second degree fetal homicide for the unborn.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom