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obligatory abortion post
A variety of people want to ban abortion for a variety of reasons. In some cases it's just "to own the libs", or as the opening battle of a campaign to "take back traditional family values" (a campaign which could presumably go on to criminalize gender reassignment, re-criminalize same-sex marriage, re-criminalize same-sex sex, re-criminalize interracial marriage, re-criminalize contraception, etc.) But the most common stated reason to ban abortion is "to save babies' lives".
Wherever you see an abortion law with exceptions for rape or incest, you can be sure that it's not about saving babies' lives, because a baby (or fetus or embryo or zygote) conceived through rape or incest is exactly as human, and has exactly the same rights, as one conceived consensually. The circumstances of conception aren't the baby's (or fetus's or whatever) fault. The only difference between an unwanted pregnancy due to rape or incest and any other kind is the parents' choices -- which in practice means the mother's choices. A pregnancy due to rape or incest is "not the mother's fault", so she shouldn't be punished for it, which (in the context of the law) implies that she should be punished for an unwanted pregnancy that is "her fault".
So what did she do that merits punishment? She chose to have sex when she didn't want to have a baby. She had sex for a reason other than making babies -- like, I don't know, as an expression of love for her partner (but not wanting to have his baby), or because it's fun. Obviously, women having sex because it's fun are threatening to men, because such a woman might choose to have sex with someone else for the same reason, and then you (her male partner) wouldn't know that she (and her offspring) was 100% yours. It's a property crime, as in last year's movie "The Last Duel" (about a time when raping a married woman wasn't a crime against her, but against her husband). And if our ancestors thousands of years ago couldn't have sex without the likelihood of getting pregnant (and dying in childbirth), that's obviously how God intended it; trying to break that equation is disobeying God's will.
And what is the fitting punishment for her crime? Obviously, to bear and raise a baby that she didn't want to have at that time or with that partner. Which, of course, also punishes the child, who grows up with a mother who may not be able to support it financially, and who's deeply ambivalent about its very existence -- I love my child, but its birth arguably ruined my life. And it punishes that mother's other already-born children, and any hypothetical children she might have planned to have later.
So a law that outlaws abortion with exceptions for rape or incest, "to protect unborn children", is dishonest. One without such exceptions, while I strongly disagree with it, I can at least respect as morally consistent with the stated goal of saving babies' lives, together with the assumption that a baby is fully, legally, and morally human from the moment of conception.
Why does anyone make that assumption? Well, people (especially social conservatives) like to think of the world as made of up clean, unambiguous, exclusive, immutable categories -- "men" vs. "women", "black" vs. "white", "good guys" vs. "bad guys", "human" vs. "non-human" -- so they need to pick one moment when a collection of protoplasm becomes a human with full rights. And once you've committed to that, the obvious choices are birth and fertilization; those are cleaner and more elegant than heartbeat, or a particular organ discernible on an ultrasound, or a particular number of weeks or months. There's almost certainly also some motivated reasoning: if you want women who have sex for reasons other than making babies to be punished, here's an easily-stated assumption which leads to that result, so you adopt it.
That assumption also leads another step to fetal-homicide and fetal-endangerment laws. Under such laws, if you're pregnant, or if you might be pregnant, you can be criminally liable for doing things that could trigger a miscarriage, cause birth defects, or otherwise endanger your baby: drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, drinking caffeine, using a variety of drugs (including many legal prescription drugs), strenuous physical activity, standing on a chair or ladder.... If you are a woman of child-bearing age and you have (heterosexual, P-V) sex, your body no longer belongs to you; it belongs to another person who may or may not even exist but whose hypothetical rights control your every daily decision. If you wanted control over your own body, you shouldn't have had sex (by choice or otherwise). The same doesn't apply to men, who can go on with our lives mostly oblivious to whether we've caused a pregnancy, because most of our subsequent actions have no effect on the pregnancy.
Justice Alito is quite right that the word "abortion", or even "privacy", isn't mentioned in the Constitution. Another word not mentioned in the Constitution is "woman". When the Constitution was written, most women lived under the protection of their father, their brother, or their husband (and women who didn't were SOL). As far as I can tell, this is the framers' "original intent" with regard to women: they don't need legal protections, rights, property, jobs, or votes of their own because their male protectors will take care of them using their legal protections, rights, property, jobs, and votes.
Wherever you see an abortion law with exceptions for rape or incest, you can be sure that it's not about saving babies' lives, because a baby (or fetus or embryo or zygote) conceived through rape or incest is exactly as human, and has exactly the same rights, as one conceived consensually. The circumstances of conception aren't the baby's (or fetus's or whatever) fault. The only difference between an unwanted pregnancy due to rape or incest and any other kind is the parents' choices -- which in practice means the mother's choices. A pregnancy due to rape or incest is "not the mother's fault", so she shouldn't be punished for it, which (in the context of the law) implies that she should be punished for an unwanted pregnancy that is "her fault".
So what did she do that merits punishment? She chose to have sex when she didn't want to have a baby. She had sex for a reason other than making babies -- like, I don't know, as an expression of love for her partner (but not wanting to have his baby), or because it's fun. Obviously, women having sex because it's fun are threatening to men, because such a woman might choose to have sex with someone else for the same reason, and then you (her male partner) wouldn't know that she (and her offspring) was 100% yours. It's a property crime, as in last year's movie "The Last Duel" (about a time when raping a married woman wasn't a crime against her, but against her husband). And if our ancestors thousands of years ago couldn't have sex without the likelihood of getting pregnant (and dying in childbirth), that's obviously how God intended it; trying to break that equation is disobeying God's will.
And what is the fitting punishment for her crime? Obviously, to bear and raise a baby that she didn't want to have at that time or with that partner. Which, of course, also punishes the child, who grows up with a mother who may not be able to support it financially, and who's deeply ambivalent about its very existence -- I love my child, but its birth arguably ruined my life. And it punishes that mother's other already-born children, and any hypothetical children she might have planned to have later.
So a law that outlaws abortion with exceptions for rape or incest, "to protect unborn children", is dishonest. One without such exceptions, while I strongly disagree with it, I can at least respect as morally consistent with the stated goal of saving babies' lives, together with the assumption that a baby is fully, legally, and morally human from the moment of conception.
Why does anyone make that assumption? Well, people (especially social conservatives) like to think of the world as made of up clean, unambiguous, exclusive, immutable categories -- "men" vs. "women", "black" vs. "white", "good guys" vs. "bad guys", "human" vs. "non-human" -- so they need to pick one moment when a collection of protoplasm becomes a human with full rights. And once you've committed to that, the obvious choices are birth and fertilization; those are cleaner and more elegant than heartbeat, or a particular organ discernible on an ultrasound, or a particular number of weeks or months. There's almost certainly also some motivated reasoning: if you want women who have sex for reasons other than making babies to be punished, here's an easily-stated assumption which leads to that result, so you adopt it.
That assumption also leads another step to fetal-homicide and fetal-endangerment laws. Under such laws, if you're pregnant, or if you might be pregnant, you can be criminally liable for doing things that could trigger a miscarriage, cause birth defects, or otherwise endanger your baby: drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, drinking caffeine, using a variety of drugs (including many legal prescription drugs), strenuous physical activity, standing on a chair or ladder.... If you are a woman of child-bearing age and you have (heterosexual, P-V) sex, your body no longer belongs to you; it belongs to another person who may or may not even exist but whose hypothetical rights control your every daily decision. If you wanted control over your own body, you shouldn't have had sex (by choice or otherwise). The same doesn't apply to men, who can go on with our lives mostly oblivious to whether we've caused a pregnancy, because most of our subsequent actions have no effect on the pregnancy.
Justice Alito is quite right that the word "abortion", or even "privacy", isn't mentioned in the Constitution. Another word not mentioned in the Constitution is "woman". When the Constitution was written, most women lived under the protection of their father, their brother, or their husband (and women who didn't were SOL). As far as I can tell, this is the framers' "original intent" with regard to women: they don't need legal protections, rights, property, jobs, or votes of their own because their male protectors will take care of them using their legal protections, rights, property, jobs, and votes.