Pastor Barnhart explains right-wing anti-abortion politics.

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I'm willing to accept that perhaps because I am a man maybe I am not qualified to have a good enough perspective on the issue, that may be fair .

There are videos, and articles going around now that if this new bill on abortion is passed that it will be the end of hook up culture. But will it? It seems kind of a reach and I think people are still going to hook up, just perhaps be more cautious, but will it really be the end?

You don't have to be a woman to have an intellectual appreciation of the principles/difficulties/humanities involved.

I am strongly in favour of abortion laws, in most situations, btw.
This is apart from the "My body, my decision" argument, which I also agree with.
I have a problem with very late-term abortion or murdering a newborn baby, however.

having worked in a labor and delivery unit [where the little ones are born] for the better part of two decades, i must beg to differ with you on this. gestation and childbirth are two of the most dangerous conditions there are.

Ok but you never have to take the risks of being pregnant because you're a man, like imagine if people expected you to grow a life inside you and bring it to term even if you don't want to. LIke would you do it if you didn't want to? Or likee should you be forced to donate blood or give up your kidney, because it could save someones life?

Also yeah government subsides for parents, that is why I just read a poor womens account on reddit where she got cut off food-stamps and can barely afford to get daycare for her kids. Her partner works full time and she's a student with working on top of that.

Also the reality is pregnancy is difficult and it can be dangerous, just declaring 'oh it's not that bad' as a man is f*****g nonsense you don't even have to experience a period let alone a pregnancy so how about don't try to mansplain periods and childbirth to women. Not trying to be an a** but like for sure you don't even experience period pain so who are you to say pregnancy isn't difficult like go ahead and have a period and give birth then maybe you can tell women how easy it is.

My mom had multiple c-sections for me and my siblings, that kind of thing can run in the family. I don't even want a child and I am absolutely not willing to get cut open to pull a baby out...like kudos to my mom but I don''t have it in me to go through that plus I reallly, really do not want children. I would be a terrible parent and they would probably get taken away from me anyways. Which would just add more abandoned kids to the sh***y system. LIke as a teen any time I talked to foster kids they told horrible stories of how their foster parents treated them. but also like it was normal from their perspective...sometimes they seemed suprised when people told them they were being abused and shouldn't be treated like that. It was freaking heart-breaking like kids who thought they were useless trash and deserved to be basically kicked around like trash so they just take the abuse. LIke if I was forced to actually have a baby once it is born I might have a hard time giving it up to such a disgusting system, but I also could not afford to take care of a baby me and my boyfriend can just afford rent we cannot afford another mouth to feed. So for us the resposible thing if a accidental pregnancy happens is to abort. But seems the right would rather see us homeless trying to raise a child we didn't want on the street than do the responsible thing and take a morning after pill or abort it before it becomes a born baby.

These are all fair points as well.

So why is the surpreme court thinking about overturning Roe vs. Wade now? Did something happen recently to cause this to happen since Roe vs. Wade is a pretty old case?

Trump packed SCOTUS with his conservative cronies.

We aren't talking about donating blood or kidneys. We’re talking about a living human being that someone wants dead. If we know someone is trying to kill us, we do what we can to protect ourselves, which in rare, extreme cases means killing the attacker as a last resort. The relevant difference between a baby and an adult is the baby can't defend themself. Indeed, no murder victim can defend themselves once their dead. Should we stop prosecuting murderers? As long as unjustifiable killing happens, as long as there are those innocents who don't have a voice to speak for themselves, it is necessary to defend the helpless and seek justice for those lives taken too early.

As to mansplaining, I see no need to justify myself. Pro-murder advocates use exaggerated language as though concern for human life is something to be ashamed of. I’ve watched 3 out of 4 of my children be born. I’m aware of how life-threatening it can be. I’m aware that it's painful. Yet somehow, if you believe the CDC, the maternal mortality rate for 2020 was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births. To hear pro-murder folks talk about it, it's a miracle that any of us are even born.

I could understand if a woman is over 40 when the rate jumps to roughly 1 for every 1,000 live births, she already has 4 kids, and an already risky, complicated pregnancy means her husband would have to raise the baby by himself AND take care of the others besides--not that the baby could be saved, but it comes down to choosing one life over another.

But I’m not talking about rare cases when it's known that a mother's life is in danger. I’m talking about usual cases in which nothing is wrong with the mother, nothing is wrong with the baby, there is no reason she cannot have the baby, and the woman wants her baby dead. Some women drown their babies in the bathtub. Rare. Extreme. But it is not unknown that Lucifer or Jesus or FSM tells a delusional mother to drown her babies. She ends up spending her life in an institution for the criminally insane or she goes to prison. I see no difference between that and abortion. College roommate steals my gf and I want him dead--no different. Crazy ex-husband wants his wife dead--no different. My daughter sneaks out with her bf and something “unfortunate” happens when I find him--no different.

Any time people start ending up dead, you can't say it's a matter of privacy or that it's nobody’s business. Dead bodies are EVERYONE’S business. Justice isn't concerned about what contractions do to your state of mind. Justice isn't interested in what happens to you about every 4 weeks more or less some days. It is concerned when life is senselessly snuffed out. I will never argue against abortion when it is justified. It's not murder. The kinds of things I do worry about should abortion become illegal (SCOTUS has NOT criminalized abortion or denied anyone the right to have one) is if a woman is in a car accident, can she be arrested for manslaughter? I knew a girl whose bf purposefully ran his car into a tree so she’d lose her baby, so yeah...a woman could lose her baby through no fault of her own and it could appear as suspicious as what my friend did. Or a woman could be forced to stop cancer treatments because methotrexate would kill her baby--so kill the woman or kill the baby? And so my justification for abortion is consistent with any justification to kill ANY human being.

I’m not normally a very emotional person. I find since I started mixing kratom in my coffee I’m slightly less emotionally numb. The idea of death or being around dead people doesn't affect me much. I’ve seen someone’s intestines outside her body and it didn't bother me. The thought of my kids dying isn't as troubling as the thought of dealing with the void in my life they leave behind. So thinking I’m going to be somehow shamed by confronting me with “woman problems” isn’t going to get very far. So I’m going to turn to problems that DO affect me. If you can justify taking the life of the unborn who haven’t done anything except exist, and they didn’t even ask for that, then you can just as easily justify all kinds of murder: Genocide, euthanasia (where it’s not assisted suicide), getting rid of your boss for firing you and risking making your family homeless (some days even I like this one), getting rid of your neighbor because you think you deserve having a nice house more than he does. So how do we do this? Declare open season on humanity? Or do we reserve death for enemy invaders, home intruders, and murderous criminals for whom the most merciful thing we CAN reasonably offer them is death at the point of a needle?

I don’t believe all human beings are equally deserving of life when killers are so quick to forfeit their own right to it. I’m just saying that the decision to end any life must be a reasonable one. If you are facing certain death and it’s a choice between yourself and someone trying to kill you, then I say do whatever you have to do. If that means killing a baby, well ok, you did your best and far be it from me to judge you for that. But indiscriminate killing because it’s inconvenient, uneconomical, painful, or distressing? None of us have that right! And with adoption trending right now most of that is irrelevant, anyway. No, I can’t speak to a woman’s experience. But I am a living human being. An attack on anyone’s right to life is an attack on mine. Man, woman, doesn’t matter. We should ALL be concerned about this.

Oh, and one more thing…

I’ve heard it said that it’s about women’s rights. No, it really isn’t. SCOTUS has done the right thing and made it a matter for the American people to decide. Since there are more women than men in the USA and those women are allowed to vote by secret ballot, women have the power to determine whether abortion is a universal woman’s right. They’ve been speaking out and saying it’s more important to protect the unborn. I look forward to this being put to an ACTUAL vote and seeing where the chips fall. I think you’ll have abortion in some places and not in others and you’ll have to decide where you want to live based on that. What’s more important to you—having access to abortion or living where you are? If I felt I was being attacked for being who I am, I’d move. I HAVE felt attacked in recent years. Guess what? I moved. I don’t feel appreciated where I am, even though I made the free choice to come here. You know what I can do about it? I can move. I announced my resignation back in February and promised to finish out my contract. I’ve got a gig lined up. We’re cleaning up the house so we can put it up for sale. We’re leaving. If having the right to kill your baby means that much to you, follow suit. That’s really all I can say. I can almost guarantee you states like New York and California are going to be safe havens for baby-killers. I don’t understand what everyone is so upset about.

Women voted for Trump, too.

Well a lot of people seem to think of the abortion issue as a men vs. women issue, but I remember reading that 43% of women are pro life in the US, and 55% percent of men are pro choice, so it is really a men vs. women issue, if both sides that divided over the issue?

Many women are as vociferously pro-life as many men. No doubt about that!

There was nothing logical or reasonable about Roe. There was a different narrative back then, for one. It was also more difficult to deal with complicated pregnancies, whereas there are any number of ways that women can more safely have children. There was also the stigma of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, the stigma of rape and conception, and several other factors that made unwanted pregnancy and single motherhood unlivable. There weren’t any government programs to support young, single mothers. The only options were the wire hanger method or safer homemade vacuum devices that would cause a miscarriage. “Falling” down stairs, eating toxic foods (not actually effective, hit or miss), automobile “accidents,” and so forth were the only ways of dealing with it and keeping the girl’s private life private.

There’s not the same stigma these days, though. There are more state welfare programs to support young single mothers. Adoption has become more commonplace. Foster care, while still hellish for many, is gradually improving with more decent families stepping up and taking kids in. Churches are getting more and more involved (yeah, those conservative Evangelical Christians that supposedly don’t care about children). I personally know more families who adopt or foster—or mentor marginalized kids if nothing else. Helping underprivileged kids has always been part of my job as an educator regardless of teaching public, private, or parochial schools—the Catholic school where I taught was pretty much a dumping ground for troubled kids of all ages.

The kinds of problems that made abortion a matter of privacy just don’t exist anymore, at least not in the same meaningful way as back in the 1960’s and 70’s. The right to privacy justification for a universal, constitutional right to abortion on demand was incredibly flimsy, and there is no indication anywhere in the US constitution that the right to kill babies was anywhere remotely on the radar. On the other hand, the right to hormonal contraceptives for women is a right to privacy, and doctors are expected to keep patient information private. The Roe decision makes absolutely no sense in the present day.

The baby killing thing is bad enough. But I think the Roe set a bad precedent in that matters of public concern could be decided by only a few persons. Appeals court justices frequently legislate from the bench, and a number of appellate and SCOTUS decisions became the law of the land without a single vote in congress or general election by the people. That has created a lot of resentment by people all across the political spectrum, liberal, conservative, and moderate alike. The opinion by overturning Roe reflects the absurdity of Roe in the first place.

I make no bones about my stance on abortion. But I think now is the time to focus on the mistakes we’ve made since then and work on a way forward. The Roe decision was an absurd one and constituted legislating from the bench. It was a decision most appropriately left to the people themselves or to our representatives. The Roe decision guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion but left the matter of regulation to the states. Abortion has suffered a long death by millions of cuts as states have steadily whittled away at it. Some restrictions were successful, others were not.

The steady drip-drip-drip to ending it seems to finally reached a breaking point as there’d would never be an end to it otherwise. In the 5 decades we’ve had to deal with, not once have Democratic-majority congresses EVER made any realistic effort at converting the Roe decision into actual law. Now, why was that? I think it was because they knew good and well that legislative or general election efforts to legalize abortion would fail. Most certainly they would have failed through 3 out of 4 decades AT LEAST since public opinion was anti-abortion at least that long. Clinton deftly steered clear of conservative attacks by cooperating with conservatives while largely supporting a liberal agenda. Obama had no excuse. Biden still has no excuse. Liberals had what became Obamacare in desk drawers since before Clinton, and it was passed without anyone ever getting to read it. So why didn’t Biden ask Pelosi or Schumer or Harris to whip out abortion legislation? Because there’s not any. There was never going to be any. And liberals were banking on SCOTUS respecting precedent in keeping Roe alive.

I’m even shocked by it. SCOTUS rarely goes against precedent. Sure, I’m excited by the leaked opinion. But it’s not real for me, yet. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop. The last significant SCOTUS reversal was on segregation. Plessy v. Ferguson promised to protect the civil rights of blacks through segregation. The problem was that in practice blacks never had equal access to goods and services as whites. Brown vs Board of Education determined that Plessy further marginalized and disenfranchised blacks. I personally think that this is a potential Brown v Board moment for abortion rights. But it’s still a rare and unlikely occurrence. What we want to do is watch states with trigger laws and see what happens in the next year.

There won’t be a retrial of Roe (metaphorically speaking) for a looooong time. But abortion rights advocates will begin looking for the next Roe soon and the drip-drip-drip will start all over again. Right to privacy won’t be an effective argument, but perhaps a different constitutional approach might work. My prediction is that anti-abortion legislation will lose in appeals court for being too vague as they always have in the past since Roe. On the surface, the Texas law seems ridiculous and stupid. But its apparent absurdity only masks its genius—a law that makes abortion illegal BUT prevents the state from actually enforcing it. Only individuals can enforce it! It’s insane. But so was Roe. And this has left pro-murder advocates stumped as to what to do about it.

Now, the case before SCOTUS right now is from Mississippi, where I live. Mississippi laws already restrict abortion to 16 weeks. The new law goes to 15 weeks. The rationale is that abortions beyond this point are MORE dangerous and harmful for women, though counter arguments challenge any evidence to that effect. The law never actually went into effect because it went to court before the ink ever dried on the governor’s signature. Until laws are passed that outright legalize or ban abortion, all SCOTUS can expect is a steady drip-drip-drip of abortion cases. Have someone draft a law, email it out to every red state legislature. One state passes the law, appeals court bounces it to SCOTUS, law gets struck down. Next stage changes ONE WORD, e-mails it out to the other red states. It gets struck down. The next state changes a word, rinse and repeat. And this happens every election cycle, every session of congress, every appeals court session, everyday, zoom meetings around the clock, etc. etc. That’s where we are right now and where we’ll stay until something affirmative happens.

I think what people are kinda scared of is if the federal government passes a law guaranteeing abortion. The federal government would be unable to enforce it since the states would be responsible for that. So all the states have to do is just ignore the law. Nothing short of an armed conflict would be able to change anything, and as much support as there is for anti-abortion efforts in red states it is highly unlikely it would ever come to that. I mean, exactly how do you deploy troops for that? It’s going to be a matter of which states allow abortion, how much abortion is allowed, and how to deal with people breaking laws. The next year is going to get interesting.

But why would the government pass a law guaranteeing it when I thought they were trying to overturn roe, which is the worry?

Democrats are largely pro-abortion. If they had majorities in the house, senate, and a left-leaning SCOTUS with all the appeals courts, they could have easily passed laws guaranteeing women the right to abortion on demand without the headache of state laws forbidding it. Not everyone wants to overturn Roe. Not everyone wants abortion to be legal, either.

What you’re hearing about Roe is mostly fictitious hype. Nobody has yet to be denied any chance at an abortion. Texas is the closest to a full denial of abortion, but the law prohibits the state of Texas from enforcing it. This works by denying anyone challenging the constitutionality of the law the ability to sue any one entity for the right to an abortion. SCOTUS took one look at the law and asked “So what exactly do you expect us to do about it?” So you can get an abortion in Texas as long as someone is willing to perform it, but it’s a crap shoot if you think someone might sue you over it. The Mississippi law that started this mess doesn’t even deny anyone the right to an abortion. Trigger laws don’t prevent women from traveling out of state for abortions. And you can tell that lawmakers in California and New York fully intend to make their states safe havens for women seeking abortions.

Roe v Wade reversal by no means stops abortions. The only thing women have lost is the constitutional right to an abortion. Fun fact: Did you know that in the USA a public school education is NOT a protected, fundamental right? You are not constitutionally entitled to a public school education. It just happens that every state has a compulsory attendance law and nobody I’m aware of has challenged it. Another fun fact: All Americans have the constitutionally protected right to bear arms. NO American is legally obligated to carry guns.

So just because something is constitutionally protected doesn’t mean you are obligated to it, nor does something NOT being constitutionally protected mean that it’s against the law. Abortion is going to live to see many, many new days. Women who live in states that already allow near-unrestricted abortion on demand will experience absolutely no change in their lives whatsoever. Women in states that ban abortion will experience no change, either, because women who vote in those states aren’t the kinds of women who are going to want abortions, anyway. In Mississippi in 2017, there were
2,550 abortions. Of course, it’s likely women from Mississippi travelled outside Mississippi for abortions while many women from outside Mississippi travelled here to have it. An abortion ban in Mississippi won’t be nearly as interesting as it would be in other places.

Since Roe, Democrats have only had a filibuster-proof majority for four months. And that's assuming every single Democrat in the Senate supported their efforts (or at least, any who didn't were balanced by Republics also prepared to override the filibuster).

There has also never been a left-leaning SCOTUS. And of course, when you have naked partisans like Alito, Thomas, and Barrett on the court, there's little stopping them from declaring that any federal law they don't like violates the 10th amendment.



As Chief Justice Roberts pointed out, the right course of action would have been to strike down the law as unconstitutional, because it clearly is. If you allow states to get around the constitution by leaving the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to private parties with no standing, then you make a mockery of the constitution. New York could pass a law allowing people to sue gun owners and effectively end the Second Amendment. Mississippi could pass a law allowing anyone to sue someone who criticises Christianity and effectively end the First Amendment.

It does after 15 weeks.


All well and good, but doesn't benefit people who can't afford to travel.


Would you therefore be OK with the right to free speech or the right to bear arms being taken away? After all, not having a constitutional right to free speech doesn't automatically mean all speech will be taken away. By the same token, the right to abortion doesn't mean that you are forced to have an abortion. That's why the abortion rights movement is called the pro-choice position. However, now the ultra-conservatives and Brett Kavanaugh are voting to strip Americans of their constitutional rights and consequently many Americans will lose the ability to access abortion.

I also think it's very optimistic to predict that the pro-life movement will settle for abortion being a "states' rights" issue. Unfortunately as long as about half the federal judges are appointed based on their adherence to ideology rather than merit, there is an incentive for federal judges to conform to ideology, and the Alito opinion already makes it clear that they're willing to consider going further. Some whackjob will sue their state for allowing abortion. I'd hope that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would side with the other competent justices (insert Sotomayor joke) if such a case came before the court, but I can't be certain they would.


Firstly, bloody big assumption!

Secondly, big qualifier in bold! People who don't vote don't suddenly lose their rights.

Not an assumption, it’s a prediction. Once states fix laws in place concerning abortion, people are going to wake up one day and realize that the world is still turning and life is going to go on as it always has. If you are a women’s rights person, you’ll live in a pro-woman state with access to baby-killers all hours of the night if that’s what you want. If you’d never entertain the thought of having an abortion, you can live, really, anywhere you want, but most likely somewhere that’s a good fit with your values. You’ll wake up one day without your right to abortion and never miss it. You might even feel better knowing other women at least where you live won’t have an abortion. If you don’t want to risk a baby, you’ll get birth control in one form or another.

As far as voting goes…as I mentioned earlier, women often vote more than men do. If anything, they are asserting their rights more than men right now. If women agree that abortion should go away, what do you say to that?

And in the 1800's many people saw Negroes as lower forms of life, as subhumans.
They used to be counted as plantation 'Stock'.
Would anyone today seriously entertain that Slavery was morally justified because the racist culture of that time saw their victims as subhuman?

No? Then why try to justify abortion through such a spurious argument?