Written in response to a discussion about religion, specifically criticism towards committing to religious belief, believing in grand claims, and believing in one religion despite the possibility of being wrong. Alongside typical stuff like evidentiary burdens, proof vs. disproof. I find these lines of thought tend to hold religious concepts to standards we don’t apply to other forms of learning, part of a broad trend to have religious and secular parts of communities otherize each other. So, this comment is principally opposed to the otherization of religion.
Religious learning isn’t really that different from other forms of belief and learning. Like in any science, it’s not so much about having a perfect answer, but getting the best answer available to you, given your capacity to learn, plus the learning communities and resources which you can access, and of course, your own intuition and biases.
An earnest godseeker will usually favor a religious ideology or institution based on how well it connects them to religious growth (and that growth can be in terms of conduct or ideology).
Religion is full of deeply complicated questions. Some questions give rise to serious divides between faith groups, others don’t. But people have their sense of reality, accurate or not, but that’s hardly exclusive to matters of faith. Consider how government leaders don’t have the option of verifying empirically how their every act is going to play out; leaders have to commit to an ideology and courses of action well before they can understand the implications of those decisions. In the sciences, interminable debates rage over interpretations of quantum theory, mathematicians debate over whether and to what extent math is real, Freud is still debated in literature despite his being abandoned by psychology, and so on. Scholars take their position realizing, but never believing, that they could be wrong. We hear all about the rugged scientists who stuck to their positions until they were finally proven right, but for each such story, there are 20 scientists who just turned out to be wrong.
Another illustration: geocentric models of the solar system are only marginally less accurate than heliocentric ones (and much of that difference would not exist if we had refined the geocentric model over the past centuries). Geocentrism wasn’t abandoned because it was inaccurate in a predictive or prescriptive sense. Rather, heliocentrism was simpler mathematically and human intuition grew to favor it.
So in a world where even accuracy, modeling, and empiricism can’t answer all our questions, even when we need answers and must act, and we must rely on intuition and preference, religion is not peculiar. It is not even peculiar in terms of how grand its claims are. When you consider how you and I will never count the stars, nor measure the distance from the Earth to the Sun, nor witness Julius Caesar’s assassination, nor view the functioning of our organs, but we believe what others tell us about these startling, almost incomprehensible things. We can personally verify parts of the great mysteries, but 99% of our abstract knowledge will always be something we’re told to believe and must take on faith.
For myself, I subscribe to my religion based on certain phenomena I have experienced which genuinely aren’t covered by secular psychology, plus an intuition that I am on a productive course of inquiry and learning. I very strongly feel that i am much closer to the truth thanks to my religion than i would be if i relied on my own powers. Also, while not a foundation of my faith, studying advanced mathematics very much impressed upon me how arcane knowledge and reality are: even understanding it, i am tempted to call it magic.
I would also note how there is no dearth of evidence for the existence of some form of divinity. Consider how many people, over history, have claimed to have communicated in some form with a god. Certainly, a good number of them were off in some way. But if even one of these people told the truth, that’s it. Thousands of witness testimony should not be discarded hastily. And I can personally add that I know some very well grounded people who have offered testimony of some kind.
it’s part of a brilliant sequence about the nature of human conflict in the final episode and how conflict’s not remediable by good faith, because there are genuine issues that need resolving for which the solution is not at all clear. no se muere la controversia.
There is a lot of disinformation going around. In particular, a lot of people have made it out that these laws do not contain exceptions for medical emergencies, something that seemed incredibly unlikely to me. So, I read every relevant statute I could find and figured out what exceptions apply under each law.
Summary
20 states would have an abortion ban applying to any time or almost any time during the pregnancy. More states would ban after a a set period of time. 14 states have trigger laws, 5 have laws predating Roe still on the books, and 1 recently passed a law prohibiting abortion. 1 more included here merely has a proposed trigger law, but local media seems to suggest its passage is very likely.
Every one of these states would allow abortion for medical emergencies. Even statutes from the 1800s provide exceptions for medical emergencies (Wisconsin’s, for instance).
7 states (35%) have rape or incest exceptions. Only Mississippi exempts rape but not incest. No state exempts incest but not rape.
Of states enacting bans, Utah has the most comprehensive exceptions.
Since I’m just one person, there may be slight errors, but I believe this is mostly accurate. If you are concerned about your particular state, investigate it thoroughly and do not rely on this information, whose purpose is merely to survey and summarize.
Code is the citation with a link to the text itself. Some are links to the text as codified, others to the enrolled bills pre-codification.
The categories differentiate between laws passed before Roe was decided and laws passed with a provision that they will only go into effect if Roe is overturned or states otherwise gain the ability to restrict abortion as if Roe were overturned (such as if a constitutional amendment were passed).
Medical emergency is usually defined with reference to a medical professional’s good faith or reasonable evaluation that there is a serious health risk to the mother. The exact definition of serious health risk will vary, but broadly speaking it includes serious bodily harm, impairment of body functions, etc. May include some mental health emergencies, depending on the state, the exact nature of the emergency, and how well verified the emergency is (e.g., Alabama allows only mental emergencies verified by certain psychiatrists if the mental illness will cause suicide or the murder of the unborn child). Most states, when they contemplate the issue explicitly, exclude suicidality and self-harm as excuses for abortion. Many states’ statutory definitions of medical emergency are general enough that lethal anomaly could be included under their definition of medical emergency. The differences in statutory language reveal uncertainty about how to handle mental health, due to the tension between genuine mental health issues and appropriation of mental health issues by bad faith actors (just like the insanity defense has been severely harmed by the numbers of people who claim insanity because they think, contrary to fact, that insanity’s an easy way to get off).
Ectopic pregnancies is marked if there is an explicit allowance for abortions of ectopic pregnancies. The lack of a mark does not mean they would be prohibited, especially given medical emergency and lethal anomaly exceptions.
Lethal anomaly exemptions allow abortions where the unborn child will die at birth, be stillborn, or die shortly thereafter. E.g., Alabama’s definition: “A condition from which an unborn child would die after birth or shortly thereafter or be stillborn.” Language varies; sometimes it’s framed in terms of medical futility, lack of viability, etc. Might also be included under medical emergency when the definition does not limit itself to risks to the mother or when no definition for medical emergency is provided.
Rape and Incest exceptions often explicitly require a police report to have been filed prior to seeking an abortion. South Carolina would require the physician performing the abortion to report the allegation instead after informing the patient.
An entry in the threshold section means the ban only applies if a heartbeat is detected in the unborn (alongside a requirement that doctors perform reasonable checks when there is no medical emergency). Generally, the physician need only take reasonable steps to identify a heartbeat; if none is found after a reasonable test, there is no liability. Several states have looser, time-based thresholds. Heartbeat thresholds are included because they apply so early in a pregnancy.
Based on my review of the statutory texts, miscarriages, abortions that increase the probability of a live birth, unintentional injury/death, or accidents to the unborn (including during medical interventions by medical professionals) are frequent, explicit exceptions. Where not explicit, I would highly doubt that they are not implicit-the statutes that don’t explicitly mention this are usually brief.
Many, but not all, statutes explicitly disallow the prosecution of the abortion patient.
Many of these bills also explicitly target or condemn abortions of unborn children for reasons of sex, gender, or nonlethal disability (especially Down Syndrome).
Notes on inclusions: I focused on states included in these two lists: 1 (specifically states listed as banning), 2. I excluded some states when I could not find any texts supporting what the article said, e.g., (1) lists North Carolina as banning abortion, but local news reports suggest no such thing. States listed as restricting I left out since, generally speaking, a ban is more extreme than a restriction and so the restrictions can be expected to be looser than the bans. Obviously, I can’t catch everything, but I’m not aware of having missed anything and anything I would’ve missed will probably be similar to one of the statutes included in the chart. It’s hard to imagine any statute, for instance, not including the medical exemption. Some states also had a pre-Roe statute and a trigger law. For simplicity, I limited my study to the trigger laws.
Brief Note on Roe
Roe set itself up for repeal. Even for the pro-abortion position, Roe was bad law, because of how it fueled the culture war and left so little room for discretion.
The Supreme Court did not have the authority to issue the decision in Roe. I am not a textualist by any means, but the Court has to base its decisions on its Constitutional authority of interpretation. Roe did not interpret anything. The main text referenced is the 14th Amendment, but the connection to the 14th Amendment is tangential at best. The Court does not have authority to make such decisions, regardless of how good or bad they are, because these decisions are not interpretations. Interpretation is precisely the limit that prevents Justices from being kings.
Roe violated the interpretive limit, but reversing Roe probably does not since the reversal is itself based on interpretation. Undoing an abuse of discretion is not itself an abuse of discretion.
Roe set onerous obstacles on legislatures regulating abortion no matter how reasonable that regulation was, and it has left the US with radical abortion laws untempered by science or morality. Roe didn’t just block abortion bans; it made all sorts of regulation impossible. A Supreme Court decision like Roe is a sledgehammer: it does not allow for refinement, caution, compromise, or (ultimately) good governance.
Because of these flaws in Roe, discourse around abortion has been extremist and conflictive. Roe deserves blame for fueling the culture war in ways which statutes, legitimately enacted by legislatures, do not.
In a post-Roe v. Wade world, there will be more states restricting, not just banning, abortion. But abortion in many-maybe even most-states will be exactly the same as it was under Roe.
State legislatures certainly have the power to legislate for and against abortion in a post-Roe world, so long as their state’s constitution grants them that power. I don’t particularly think that Congress has that power, though. Federal legislation has to be based on some vested power to Congress, of which only 2 might be relevant. I don’t think banning or preempting state legislation really falls under either the Commerce Power or the 14th Amendment Powers.
Personal note
This information has been prepared to be as neutral as possible, even if my personal feelings are very much nonneutral. I write this, not to invite debate (I have little doubt you or I would be convinced by anything either of us write), but because disclosure and openness about the biases I write under are important.
I approve of Utah’s approach, because I can only see abortion as justifiable where there exists a serious intervening cause. The life-status of the unborn invokes so many unsolvable questions of epistemology and semiotics that it’s impossible to show the unborn are not humans. I certainly consider the murder of a pregnant woman to be a double homicide, as well as a nonconsensual abortion to be murder. I don’t think miscarriage and abortions are distinguished by mere sentimentality. If we can’t be reasonably certain abortion isn’t homicide, if that question remains in a zone of ambiguity, I don’t think action is justified. And, even if abortion absolutely weren’t murder, I don’t know that it’d be different enough to be tolerable.
I also note how often the consent for abortion is nominal or uninformed. Legal access to abortion makes it much easier to pressure, manipulate, coerce, and abuse women into acting contrary to their will. On the question of choice, I find abortion just as, if not more disturbing, when men, partners, or family make the decision. Abortion also has nasty and enduring connections to eugenics, racism, sexism, classism, and ableism (enough so that Ginsburg may or may not have been caught up in that, enough that it may have at least influenced Roe).
Additionally, I note how urgent healthcare reform, orphanage/foster care reform, mental health reform, education reform, child rights reform, and parental rights reforms (like parental leave) are. As well as things like drug, alcohol, labor, and economic reform because of how much issues in those areas hurt people and their children. Abortion is one of the most serious forms of dehumanization of children, but it’s far from the only one.
Finally, I’m horrified when I reflect on how 1/3 of pregnancies were terminated the year I was born in my home state. A lot of us live lonely lives, and it is certainly lonelier, more painful, knowing that 1/3 of the kids who would’ve been my peers never drew breath.
