Summary of BBC article
The Supreme Court of the United States
In “Mississippi abortion: US Supreme Court to hear major abortion case” (2021), we read that both sides of the long-running debate on the legality of abortion in the United States consider it significant that the Supreme Court of the United States has decided to rule on a law by the Mississippi government that challenges the status quo established by the court’s 1973 ruling on Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed the right to abortion on request throughout the US for at least the first three months of a pregnancy. Opponents of abortion hope that in its ruling on whether "all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional," the more conservative Supreme Court created by three appointments made by Donald Trump will undo much of the legal precedent set by Roe v. Wade, in which the question of whether a foetus could live outside of the mother’s womb was made central.
If you look at my Google Doc where I wrote this summary paragraph, you will see that this is the 2nd version. It's 150 words. The first draft was too long, at 169 words. Because I had already spent 39 minutes planning, and read the article again before writing, it took me 10:00 minutes to write my first draft, and another 6:00 minutes editing to get it down to the maximum of 150 words. The total time taken to plan, write and edit this one, short paragraph was 55:00 minutes, or a little more really including the initial time spent reading my chosen article.
Version 3, about an hour after I had published version 2: I wasn't happy with some of the language, so I've revised again by moving a chunk of words to a different position in the second sentence, and in the process reducing the word count to 149 words. I'm happy with this draft.
Response to BBC article
When I saw this article, my initial thought was: “Oh, no. Here we go again.” As the article notes, abortion has been a major controversy in the US for the 50 years since the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States - it’s a standard abbreviation) decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973. But when I thought about it more, it really wasn’t a surprise. Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 thanks in part to promising the Christian conservatives that he would work to overturn the settled legal precedent, and that is exactly what he did with the three appointments he got to make to SCOTUS. If only Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg could have lived for a few more months!
One of the things that I enjoy reading is the opinions that SCOTUS hands down. Some are on boring issues, but many have substantial implications for society. Roe v. Wade is one of the most famous, but the court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, for example, resulted in same-sex marriage immediately becoming legal throughout the United States. The nine justices of the court all write very well. And it’s fascinating to read as they develop their arguments for or against a position that must ultimately be tied back to the articles of the very short Constitution of the United States of America, which has now guided that nation for almost 250 years. It’s been amended, as all such creations should be, but has without interruption guided the functioning of the liberal democracy it founds.
Roe v. Wade, however, is not one of my favourite opinions. The justices reasoning is as solid as always as they argue that the the provisions of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution require that abortion not be restricted by state law until the fetus becomes increasingly viable, or able to live, outside of the mother’s womb. Naturally, there are dissenting opinions from a couple of justices, it being rare for all nine to agree on any controversial issue; in this case, I’m more inclined to agree with the dissenting opinions.
Because this new case, Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, threatens to greatly revise the legal basis for abortion laws by individual US states, I will be keen to read the judges’ opinions, although they probably won’t hand it down before the middle of next year. (It’s scheduled to be heard during the 2021-22 term.)
Although I think a better solution to the abortion controversy would be an explicit constitutional amendment, I favour the right of women to have an abortion on request. The constitutional amendment I would like to see is one that defines a person as an entity that has to some degree a mix of the characteristics that we normally associate with being a person: self-awareness, desires and preferences, plans, feelings, an ability to reason, emotional bonds, and so on; and which amendment further stipulates that only human persons can have human rights protected by law, including the right to life.
This would protect the right of women to abortion. Every human fetus is a human being, but no unborn baby is a person. When they are born, human babies do not have the defining characteristics of a person, which only come over the following months and years as the brain develops. It seems to me that it cannot, therefore, be wrong to kill an unborn baby. It is certainly killing a living human being, but since it’s being a person that matters, I’m hoping that SCOTUS might greatly revise the legal foundations of abortion in the US by putting the focus more strongly on whether the fetus is a person, and thus make abortion much easier for women to receive than it currently is. The conservative Christian law makers of Mississippi who deliberately wrote a law that conflicts with previous SCOTUS rulings are, of course, hoping for a very different outcome.
Whatever the US Supreme Court decides in this case is unlikely to end the controversy surrounding this issue.
As with my summary, you can also see the Google Doc where I wrote this response before copying and pasting it in here. I am a bit worried about the length, but decided to publish this version anyway. After pasting in here, I also read it again and made a few more small edits.
Question for readers
What do you think? Is an unborn human baby a human being, or a person, or both, or neither?
Although it is two sentences, this only asks one question.
Reference
Mississippi abortion: US Supreme Court to hear major abortion case. (2021, May 17). BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57148278
Although opponents argue that abortion is illegal due to it kills an innocent unborn infant, I believe that a baby will be a person who will be protected by law only when his or her birth happens completely. Indeed, a fetus is a developing embryo of a human being whose brain and major organs are not fully developed. It should not be considered as a person under the law from my perspective.
ReplyDeleteAlthough someone argues that babies can be well-raised by their families after the unintended birth, this is only true in a few cases. Many children are mistreated by their parents because they are unable to afford the cost of raising children. Those children could be sent to an orphanage, become homeless, or, in the worst-case scenario, are killed by their own family.
Abortion will be one of the preventive measures that reduce the occurrence of further social problems. As you mention, women should have the right to abortion if they are not ready to take care of a child. Terminating the pregnancy before birth is not the same as killing a person because the fetus is not represented as an infant. That is why I am a supporter of abortion right.
I agree with Yo when he disputes the idea that "babies can be well-raised by their families after the unintended birth" (2021, May 26, 14:24), which he points out is not normally true. As I read his response, I was reminded of a famous research paper written around 2005 by economists in the US. They used the statistical methods of economic analysis to investigate why crime had fallen so dramatically in the US in the 1990s after having gradually risen for many years. There were other factors, but the evidence suggested that the single biggest cause of the reduction of crime in the US in the 1990s was the legalization of abortion in 1973. It appears that when women choose an abortion, it is not only the best decision for themselves, but is good for society, since unwanted, unloved and uncared for children do not subsequently grow up to be criminals or otherwise cause problems for society.
DeleteNote that the first sentence of my reply uses attributive language to report that Yo is the author of the idea in the sentence. It combines both "quotation" and paraphrase to state the idea that I want to follow up in my comment.
DeleteFinally, because a year is not enough to specify the source, Yo's comment, it's necessary to include the time in hours and minutes; it would be OK here to simply give the date and time, leaving out the year, since that is already known and can reasonably be assumed to be the same as the year of of publication of the blog post.
As I read Yo's comment, I also thought about how irrational we humans often are. In particular, I remembered a recent article in the Bangkok Post, "88 macaques saved from exotic-food trade". The story tells of how monkeys had been saved from being sent by Thai suppliers to rich people in other countries to be turned into special meals.
ReplyDeleteThe outrage at the suffering inflicted on the monkeys is appropriate, but I also have to wonder about it. Why would we think it is wrong to make monkeys suffer before killing them to turn them into dinner while we think it's perfectly OK to pay businesses to make chickens, pigs and other animals suffer before being killed so that we can have cheap pork and chicken nuggets? Monkeys look cute, but is that really a good reason to treat them differently to pigs or chickens?
There is also a closer link to the abortion issue. The animals we kill to eat are living things as much as any human fetus: it's hard to see any reason why the human fetus should be treated differently by the law and by our moral reasoning than the animals we kill to eat. If they were consistent, shouldn't people who oppose abortion also oppose killing animals for meat?
But perhaps there is some relevant difference I haven't thought of that others can point out to me.
The article about the macaque monkeys I cited was published in the Bangkok Post on May 28, which is why I remembered it.
Delete