Cerin wrote: ↑Sun Jun 26, 2022 1:11 am
N.E. Brigand wrote: ↑Sat Jun 25, 2022 11:49 pmCerin wrote: ↑Sat Jun 25, 2022 9:36 pmThe irony here is very deep. Had the recently proposed bill on abortion been as sensible as the French law (and the laws of many other countries), Joe Manchin would have voted for it and all of the worries voiced here would have been moot. He says he would even have voted for a law that codified Roe (that is, abortion until viability), but that wasn't good enough for the Democrats, who insisted that abortion must be legal until the moment before birth.edit: oops! forgot about the filibuster
The full text of the bill is available at the link. After you have a chance to review it, I hope you will share your further thoughts on it.
I did not take the time to read the bill you very kindly provided the link for, as your quoted portion was sufficient for this reply. Regarding the text you quoted in your post, there was a portion that mentioned health as well as life (emphasis added):
In addition, governments may not <snip> (2) prohibit abortion services before fetal viability or after fetal viability when a provider determines the pregnancy risks the patient's life or health.
I'm sure you know that this has long been a point of objection in the abortion debate, because health includes mental health, and (as the argument goes) a woman can simply say she is depressed about the pregnancy the day before her due date and that will legally be enough, etc.
Whoa! Where did those goalposts go?
The claim was that Joe Manchin would have voted for a bill that (a) permitted abortions with limitations like those imposed in France
or (b) codified
Roe.
The bill whose text that I provided, which Joe Manchin voted against, codifies
Roe.
Sure, conservatives have long expressed concerns about the misuse of "health". Per
Roe, in the third trimester of a pregnancy, i.e., "For the stage subsequent to viability,"
Roe says that "the State, in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life, may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or
health of the mother" (emphasis added).
Maybe that part of
Roe is wrong (I don't think it is), but that's not the claim that we were discussing.
(
Edited to add: But since you brought it up, consider the Breyer/Kagan/Sotomayor dissent in
Dobbs, which says that globally the trend "has been toward increased provision of legal and safe abortion care. A number of countries, including New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Iceland, permit abortions up to a roughly similar time as
Roe ... Canada has decriminalized abortion at any point in a pregnancy" (I would add: for any reason, and it's federally funded). And while Western European nations mostly "impose restrictions on abortion after 12 to 14 weeks ... they often have liberal exceptions to those time limits, including to prevent harm to a woman's physical or
mental health" (emphasis added).)