Roe v. Wade is history

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Biden signs executive order on abortion, declares Supreme Court 'out of control'

Looks like he's attempting to do that.

Actually...it seems he's made an executive order that resembles pretty much everything else he's done up to this point--amounting to very little. Biden's order forbids the states from preventing women from crossing state lines to get abortions. It also prevents the states from banning access to drugs that have been approved by the FDA for 20 years. If you take Dobbs vs. JWHO and the subsequent trigger law as a benchmark, women are not prevented by state law from getting abortions.

Let me say that again for the people in the back: Women in Mississippi are not prevented by Mississippi's trigger laws from seeking abortions.

Mississippi's trigger law only prevents medical professionals from performing the procedure.

I'm unsure what Mississippi's law says about obtaining medical abortions through the mail. If Mississippi bans e-medicine abortions, then Biden's executive order protects anyone who provides them to women. As far as crossing state lines--I don't believe such a law even exists, first of all, and second, it's not an enforceable law even if it did.

What Biden has done is pretty much sign an executive order that protects rights Americans already have.

Here's the applicable text from the Mississippi law that was passed back in 2007:


I find this interesting for several reasons. One thing that stands out to me is that no laws in Mississippi extend personhood to the unborn, not even this one. Back in 2011, there was a personhood amendment on the state election ballot. It failed. It wasn't that people in Mississippi are pro-abortion. The majority of us aren't. The problem is that personhood would mean that ANY loss of the unborn, even at no fault of the mother, could potentially be legally seen as manslaughter. It would be extremely difficult for ANYONE to seek an abortion for any reason, even to save the life of the mother.

What is most striking about this is it effectively absolves women of all fault for losing a baby. Even if they deliberately cause an abortion ( in medical terms, ANY loss of a baby is an abortion. My wife has, technically speaking, had two abortions. Neither of those was her fault, and her OB emphasized that these things happen more often at our age), women cannot be held accountable for losing a baby. The way the law is worded, a woman can take a drug to end her pregnancy (induce an abortion) and not be prosecuted. There is no mention whatsoever of seeking medication outside the state, traveling to another state for a procedure, providing assistance to women to leave the state...NOTHING. Not at all.

In essence, Biden's executive order is pretty much powerless in Mississippi--women in Mississippi even under the trigger law still have the same freedoms that Biden's exec order supposedly protects.

I can't speak for other states. But...again, if the states were to ban women from crossing state lines to seek abortions, exactly what real power do the states have to enforce those laws? None. And Biden's order is nothing but symbolic, to say that Biden and his party dislike bans on abortion.

Why didn't Biden just make an executive order preventing states from banning abortion? That just goes back to good, ol' checks and balances, the power of the executive over states' rights. SCOTUS made it a states' rights issue. An executive order preventing the states from banning abortion would be a huge overstep, something Biden would struggle to enforce, and which probably wouldn't hold up if it bounced up to SCOTUS. For Biden, it would be a PR disaster. With Biden not even faring so well among liberals right now, it would be political suicide. Biden's order is predicated on a strawman argument--that overturning Roe effectively means a ban on abortion and that the states are actually going to attack women's right to privacy and freedom to travel to where abortions are permitted, and ban women from seeking medical abortions at home enabled by medical professionals outside the state. A ban on that level would be nearly impossible to enforce. Biden's exec order takes aim at a strawman rather than real actions (as far as I'm aware) taken by the states. It's a cheap way to put a positive spin on the administration.

For the pro-abortion crowd, it's an empty victory. I once told someone when Cavanaugh was appointed that SCOTUS would respect precedent and preserve Roe and Casey and that Democrats had bigger problems than overturning abortion. I hadn't counted on something like Brown v Board of Education happening. So I admit my prediction was wrong--AT THE TIME overturning Roe and Casey was extremely unlikely, but that only demonstrates how things can change in the span of a few years (Cavanaugh didn't dismantle Roe/Casey as my Twitter acquaintances claimed. The lawyers representing JWHO and presenting the same, old, tired, and now-irrelevant oral arguments as their predecessors did a great job of that on their own). Politically, there are other issues out there like a potential impending recession, the smoldering remains of the pandemic panic in the USA, inflation, prohibitively high gasoline prices, shortages of necessities such as baby formula, food processing plants burning down (I don't actually believe there's a conspiracy to starve Americans out. I'm just saying with the present climate people get spooked by things), increasing resentment towards gender and identity politics...I could keep going on and on. A knee-jerk, panic response to abortion rights that, well, not even the media care that much about anymore is barely a spark in the dumpster fire that is the current state of partisan politics.

Biden is 4th down and 80 yards on protecting abortion rights. He has to punt. It might bring a smile to a few Democrats in the short term. In the long term, it has very little meaning in affecting overall outcomes. The same could be said for pretty much everything Biden has down throughout his term thus far.

SAFE abortions are performed by medical professionals. They are not performed by your drug dealer and they are not self-administered.
Any unessessary expense turns this into a class issue. Safe abortions for those who can afford to travel and take time off work and a big middle finger to the rest.

I'm sure the governerner's wife can afford to travel. They don't pass laws to control themselves.

Hurray!! (?)

Maybe one day they'll make men do self-vasectomies too!

How about self-dentistry or self-prostate surgery?

Guys, nothing to worry about. Ulcer pills for all! (Until they get banned because they can be used for abortion.)
Coathangers for all! (No wait, they'll ban them too...)

Self-dentistry is easy. Just open your mouth and reach in. Maybe snip out your tonsils while you're in there.

Self-prostate is a little more tricky but if you use stirrups and a shot of tequila, you should be fine.

You might want to find a friend you trust.

Which means most of us are f****d in an uncomfortable place.

Moral dilemma: Can a doctor perform her own abortion with a coat hanger? Or is that like double jeopardy?

I would argue that there’s no such thing as a safe abortion.

But beside the point. That fact is medical abortions are possible now through e-medicine and are generally considered “safe” and even better in some cases than having to go to a clinic. I don’t see the problem.

The “class” excuse, at least in the USA, is fiction. I mean, if taking off work is the problem, nobody can get abortions anyway. What, you go to work, slip into the bathroom with an abortionist, and then slip right back into your cubicle like nothing happened? Ask my wife how easy it is to go about her regular day after having a miscarriage. Losing or getting rid of a baby is going to take at least as long as it takes to make the appointment, sit in the waiting room up to an hour AFTER the appointment, get an exam, and have the actual procedure which will be all of 10-15 minutes (more/less, I don’t remember. I know it’s quick) along with with a few minutes to make sure there are no complications. There will be some continued bleeding for a while, and she probably doesn’t need to go back to work if there’s a lot of activity/heavy lifting involved anyway.

The point being that there is no distinct advantage gained from having an abortion since it requires at least one day off work.

On the other hand, travel is easy and cheap, even considering gas prices. It’s not unreasonable to tell an employer that you’re planning a long weekend. You travel to Chicago overnight, have the procedure. The clinic knows you’re traveling, so they let you rest a while before going back home. What you really want is someone to go with you, which you probably should even if you didn’t have to travel, and have that person handle driving back. You have all weekend plus a Monday to recover, and you’re back on Tuesday right as rain.

The class excuse doesn’t hold up. Even if only the rich can afford travel, abortion services cost money, anyway. There’s not THAT much government funding for abortion to begin with. Up until a couple weeks ago, there was ONLY ONE abortion clinic even in Mississippi. So if you lived in Tupelo, you’d have to work out how you’d get to Jackson. I don’t have numbers, but I’d almost bet money that more women were ALREADY leaving Mississippi to have abortions than were being performed in the state. Likewise, for other women, for instance in parts of Alabama or northeast Louisiana, it might be easier to travel to Jackson to have an abortion.

And that means that Mississippi’s trigger law only put into law what was already happening in Mississippi anyway. The only difference is women cannot travel to Mississippi to have an abortion in a clinic, and women who elect to have an abortion in a clinic will have to travel elsewhere. Which…they kinda had to do anyway.

For people in Mississippi, blocking abortion solves more problems than it causes. Plus, it doesn’t block women from reputable e-medicine providers and adequate care. Early abortions by taking two pills is considered safe, something women can self-monitor at home with little fear of risk to themselves. It’s not terribly expensive. And if something does go wrong, women are not prevented from emergency services than if they had a procedure in a clinic.

I’d actually prefer DIY medicine. It’s not a matter of whether a man is allowed to do a self-vasectomy, but whether such a procedure is safely doable by the man performing it on himself. And you know good and well that the coat hanger method is only marginally safer than a self-vasectomy. Apples and oranges. Vasectomies are microsurgery, abortion is not. If there was a pill I could take for male sterilization, I’d be first in line. Pills DO exist for abortions. They are effective. And the way the Mississippi law reads women aren’t prohibited from seeking abortions.

Seems it's only a matter of when, not if...

[BBC] Roe v Wade: Abortion pills a new front in culture wars

And there is no such a thing as a safe childbirth, either. In fact, abortion (in proper conditions) seems to hold less risk for an average woman's health than childbirth does:

According to this, the risk of death is 14 times higher during childbirth than abortion.

This one says the death risk in abortion is about 0,7 %, which is a lot lower than in childbirth.

Would probably find more with more digging. The point is, while abortion is always a health risk, statistically it's a way smaller health risk than actually giving birth. And we're not even talking about the higher financial risks of giving birth yet.

I read Fireblossom's link and would like to point out the important bit.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 2002 data, the death rate of women having legal abortions was 0.7 abortion-related deaths per 100,000 legal induced abortions.

I can't imagine there are figures on the death rate of women having illegal abortions. I would guess it is a lot higher and therefore more dangerous.

You want women to take a pill to terminate at home, without medical support?
You're suggesting they have no IV, no monitoring, etc., whether it's coat hanger or not?

Losing a baby is traumatic, graphic, and involves blood loss as well as pain.
Sometimes tissue remains and can become gangrenous or infected.

This isn't just about microscopic zygotes.
I don't even think a pill could terminate a more developed pregnancy.

If you don't think vasectomy is comparable, try the prostate.
There's an easy access hole, and you'd just have to snip it out in one piece.
Blood loss should be minimal.



* I don't mean to sound harsh against you specifically, AngelRho.
It's just that the RW media pushes an idea that women can just pop a pill (if that's even allowable), and everything will be fixed without physical, emotional, or mental health repercussions. It's not that easy to just pop a pill, and in a majority of cases which are farther along or the girl / woman needs to hide the pregnancy from their family, a DIY medicinal termination violates their right to proper health care as well as personal privacy.

Then maybe it’s best women don’t have as easy access to abortion as they did.

And you are exaggerating. It’s a myth that women have no medical support for an at-home medical abortion. If something goes wrong, women still have access to regular OB’s as well as emergency services.

Don’t attempt to shift the focus here, I’m not falling for it. Fact: the Mississippi law prevents doctors from performing abortion procedures IN MISSISSIPPI. Fact: the executive order prevents Mississippi from effectively banning medical abortion despite the fact that pregnant women will not under the trigger law be penalized for having an abortion—the executive order in relation to Mississippi is based on a straw man or is not applicable to Mississippi. Fact: Medical abortions do NOT mean women who have medical abortions do not have medical support—that is an outright lie. Fact: Nobody is denying women abortion drugs (yet) and Biden’s executive order would supersede any state’s ability to ban FDA-approved drugs and prevent the states from punishing women from crossing state lines.

Everything else is completely irrelevant.

The only thing that matters about removing a prostate at home is that (apples and oranges) men already have the individual freedom to remove an organ that doesn’t threaten the life of another person, same as anyone, male or female, to alter their own body in any way that they like so long as it is not a threat to another living human being.

If we go apples to apples with that: I disagree that doctors should NOT offer female sterilization on the basis of whether a woman has children. If a woman wants sterilization at any stage for any reason, it is her right as an individual to ask for it. HOWEVER…I ALSO fully support a doctor’s right to deny sterilization procedures for any reason or even no reason at all. The main problem with abortion in Mississippi has little to do with law or availability. We had an abortion clinic in Jackson. What we did NOT have was a Mississippi-based doctor willing to perform the procedure. Why not? No doctor in Mississippi was willing to put his or her reputation on the line by so much as setting foot in that clinic. Nor was there any way, legal or rational, to compel any Mississippi doctors to do it.

Technically, my wife had an abortion. Why? The baby was dead and she’d started bleeding. Her doctor performed the procedure. In a hospital. The second miscarriage she suffered she opted to tough it out at home, which meant non-stop pain and bleeding for six weeks. She could have had the procedure again. By a doctor. In a hospital. She just didn’t want the extra expense hanging over us. But she made the choice and my opinion was irrelevant.

What am I getting at? Abortion isn’t exactly banned. It IS an option in terms of saving a woman’s life, removing a baby that has died and sparing her the complications that go with that, and so on. Between loopholes ALREADY IN Mississippi’s law and in executive orders, a woman still has access to other forms of abortion or traveling. So far, I think Florida still allows abortion up to week 15. Louisiana’s law is being challenged on state constitutionality and abortions continue. Receiving medical abortions does not bar women from emergency room care or care from a current OB. And as per executive order NOTHING HAS CHANGED with FDA approved medications that have been in use 20 or more years.

The main problem is that a problem does not exist. Life still goes on as usual. And where things HAVE changed…well, when things do change adjustments, adaptations, and tweaking are required often because the world changed for a few people with the stroke of a pen…but at that point, sometimes change really is for the best.

Arrest made in rape of Ohio girl that led to Indiana abortion and international attention