Bush due to sign off new abortion opt-out law

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bushman
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drip drip drip
here come the christian fundamentalists

Gameface and his buddies have y'all watching the horizon for hordes of Islamic crazies while they sneak around behind ya and carve the place up.

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President Bush is expected to sign into law this month a controversial new piece of legislation on abortion, which has just been approved by Congress. It is the latest move in the bitter and deeply divisive debate about the provision of abortion services in the United States.

Anti-abortion groups are hailing the legislation as much-needed protection for hospitals and other health care providers who do not want to conduct abortions.


But pro-choice groups describe it as a major new restriction on abortion and further evidence of a trend towards the erosion of abortion rights.

The Hyde-Weldon Abortion Non-Discrimination Act allows health care providers, including hospitals and insurance companies, to opt out of providing or paying for abortion services without the threat of penalty, such as having their access to public funds restricted or stopped.

It is a new version of similar legislation introduced back in 2002, which was then approved by the House of Representatives but not by the Senate.

And President Bush is thought to give the legislation his personal backing. Groups who want access to abortion to be more restricted strongly support the legislation.

They see it as "conscience legislation" that allows health care providers to make their own choices about abortion services without facing the threat of being penalised by state or local authorities.


Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee accuses pro-choice groups of using state funding to exert pressure on health care providers to provide abortions.

"There has been in the United States an orchestrated campaign by pro-abortion pressure groups to force health care providers to participate in abortions," he told the BBC.

He cites as evidence a case in Alaska of a non-religious community hospital that was told by the courts it had to provide abortion services because it received state support.

He also gives examples of religiously affiliated hospitals that have had their attempts to enter into partnerships or even merger deals with other health care providers vetoed by state or local officials because the religious hospitals refuse to perform abortions.

Crying foul Pro-choice advocates see the issue very differently.

David Seldin, the communications director of NARAL Pro-Choice America, says the new legislation will make it possible for anti-abortion groups to put pressure on health care providers not to provide abortion services and to refuse to discuss abortion as an option in counselling pregnant women.


"This is not about the individual conscience of one doctor," he told the BBC.

"It's about corporate responsibility. This [legislation] gives companies the licence to ignore state laws."

He says no law requires an individual doctor to perform an abortion against his or her will but at the moment health care providers do have a legal obligation, if they receive state funding, to provide abortion services, including counselling and referrals.

"This will allow corporations to impose their ideology on medical services," he said.

Supreme Court changes

The move comes as both sides of the debate are focussing on the Bush administration's second term and its implications for abortion services in the US. At the heart of the discussion is the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that legalised abortion in the United States.

Opinion polls show that most Americans oppose Roe v Wade being overturned although pro-life groups argue that different surveys also show that the majority of Americans favour greater protection for the unborn child/foetus than Roe v Wade provides.


Both pro-choice and anti-abortion groups cite their own polls of public opinion as evidence to support their case.

Mr Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee says there is a trend towards supporting greater restrictions on abortion.

"We didn't get our current legal regime by majority vote, we got it from seven lawyers," he says.

"We think more and more Americans are figuring out how extreme Roe [v Wade] is."

Seven of the nine Supreme Court justices supported a women's right to abortion in the 1973 ruling, and his reference to the court highlights another key part of the US abortion debate.

Some commentators predict between two and four vacancies in the Supreme Court in the course of President Bush's four-year second term.

Pro-choice groups fear that President Bush will alter the composition of the court by favouring anti-abortion conservative candidates, and they believe the addition of more conservatives could lead to further restrictions on abortion rights.

"Roe v Wade is absolutely in danger," says David Seldin of NARAL Pro-Choice America. "We're very concerned about the direction the Bush administration's taking."

Conservative resurgence

A recent row about comments on Roe v Wade by Senator Arlen Specter showed the strength of feeling.

Mr Specter is a pro-choice Republican who is a leading candidate for the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which plays a key role in appointments to the Supreme Court.

He was reported as saying that Supreme Court nominees who wanted to overturn Roe v Wade were unlikely to be approved by the Senate.

Right-wing groups responded with anger, describing Senator Specter as a "problem".

Some accused Senator Specter of softening his position in response by saying that, although he was himself pro-choice, he had in the past supported many anti-abortion nominees.

The composition of the Senate too has become more conservative since the election.

Mr Johnson says it is impossible to say whether Roe v Wade may be overturned in the next four years but he agrees the current Senate leans more to the right on abortion than its predecessor. That could mean more legislative restrictions related to abortion, including laws requiring parental notification and restricting late-term abortions. <!-- E BO -->



http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4067103.stm
 

bushman
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:>Grin>

X

better get yerself a Burka before you cross the border honeypie.
 

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I'm convinced that the main reason he's pandering to the Hispanics is because they're Catholic and they're breeders. Gotta get that birthrate back up, goshdarnit! All women should strive to be good little Stepfords like Laura.

I'm interested to hear Truthteller's hypocritical assessment of this. Last week, he said that just 'cause the Jehovah's Witnesses thought that blood transfusions were immoral, does that make it right for the law to make them illegal for all of us? I wonder if he thinks it's okay for JW doctor to refuse to administer blood transfusions to patients???

I wonder if the Christian fundies will support the re-opening of all those clinics they scared shut with their 'love thy neighbour' shooting sprees. That way, the hospitals wouldn't have to worry about personal ethics.
 

bushman
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Its a old fundie system, recommended by the Taliban.
smile.gif


First you force them to have children.
Then you leave them to live in poverty and squalor.

Its Gods will honey.

Allah is great. Jesus is great.(unless you're female)
 

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Remember that 800,000-women march on Washington last spring? I suspect they're going to double that figure next go-around.
 

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Oh my, we are talking about murders here and you ******** compare it to the Taliban government. I am starting to believe the saying that liberalism is a mental disease.
 

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truthteller said:
Oh my, we are talking about murders here and you ******** compare it to the Taliban government. I am starting to believe the saying that liberalism is a mental disease.

:dancefool
 

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truthteller said:
Oh my, we are talking about murders here and you ******** compare it to the Taliban government. I am starting to believe the saying that liberalism is a mental disease.

Murder is defined as taking a life. Prove that a fetus is a life and you'll have that one.

If a doctor, for personal reasons, wasn't comfortable tending to a critically ill patient who was under police custody, would that be okay with you?

Would a doctor who was also a Jehovah's Witness be exempt from performing blood transfusions because it conflicted with his religious beliefs be okay with you?

Should the judge presiding over the Scott Peterson case have chosen to invoke his personal feelings about capital punishment and apply his religion (he is anti- and Catholic) would that have been okay with you?

Or is all of this only okay when the end result suits your own personal political agenda?
 

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If it's not murder then why was Scott Peterson convicted of killing his UNBORN baby. Or you may call it a fetus.
 

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truthteller said:
If it's not murder then why was Scott Peterson convicted of killing his UNBORN baby. Or you may call it a fetus.

She was 8 1/2 months pregnant. The baby could have survived outside of the mother, if need be, at that time. Besides, Bush had just changed that law and you know it. He could change the law making all abortion murder, but it still wouldn't prove that a fetus is a life at every stage of gestation.

And Mr. Bush's new law doesn't specify at what time the doctors can opt out, does it?? It's sweeping. The legislation isn't about what the law deems murder or when a life begins ... it doesn't address that at all. It is a blanketed clause where the doctors can arbitrarily decide what they will and will not do on the job, despite the contradictions with the Hippocratic Oath.

Why won't you answer my questions, by the way? Is it because you know your stance is political and not moral, after all??
 

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xpanda said:
If a doctor, for personal reasons, wasn't comfortable tending to a critically ill patient who was under police custody, would that be okay with you?
If it's reasonable cause, then it would be ok with me. Abortion is a reasonable cause. 50% of Americans believe abortion is taking a life. That shows how controversial this matter is.

Would a doctor who was also a Jehovah's Witness be exempt from performing blood transfusions because it conflicted with his religious beliefs be okay with you?
That would be ok with me too. That's not law of the land only his personal belief. Besides there are many other doctors that would be available to take his place.

Should the judge presiding over the Scott Peterson case have chosen to invoke his personal feelings about capital punishment and apply his religion (he is anti- and Catholic) would that have been okay with you?
There are hundreds of cases that judges have invoked their personal feelings on. Nothing new there.
 

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You stated in a previous thread that you believed a person has a right to do whatever to his or her body without government intervention (assisted suicide, group marriage, drugs use etc..)

Do you believe a woman has a right to abort a a fetus if she is 7 or 8 months pregnant?
 

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xpanda said:
And Mr. Bush's new law doesn't specify at what time the doctors can opt out, does it?? It's sweeping. The legislation isn't about what the law deems murder or when a life begins ... it doesn't address that at all. It is a blanketed clause where the doctors can arbitrarily decide what they will and will not do on the job, despite the contradictions with the Hippocratic Oath.

I would love to hear your theory on why refusing to perform abortions is a contradiction to the Hippocratic Oath.
 

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Shotgun

No point asking such a question of any person who thinks there is such thing as a "right to health care." We're living in a world where a woman's husband can leave her, she can get a tit job and then sue her insurance company for refusing to pay for it because her quasi-shrink says the surgery was "neccesary" for her self-esteem and emotional well-being (true story; she was my mother's secretary but now she's retired thanks to the lawsuit.)


Phaedrus
 

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truthteller said:
Do you believe a woman has a right to abort a a fetus if she is 7 or 8 months pregnant?
I have two opinions on this. One is personal, the other is pragmatic.

If a woman were to abort at that late stage, her life must be in absolute immediate peril. That is my personal opinion. (You should know that late-term abortions in Canada are allowed only in the case of dire emergency, say after a car accident or some such thing.)

From a legal standpoint, it is impossible to determine at what stage a. a fetus becomes a baby and is considered 'live', and b. exactly how far along a pregancy is, without any room for error. From a moral standpoint, we would probably all agree that abortions should not occur after the second trimester (I personally feel there is no reason a pregnancy could not be aborted in the first trimester, as a woman generally knows within four weeks of conception that she is pregnant.) But if we define the issue as changing from a 'fetus' to a 'life' at six months, you have to be able to determine, to the day, when the pregnancy is six months along. We can't do that yet.
 

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Phaedrus said:
No point asking such a question of any person who thinks there is such thing as a "right to health care."
And you're right. The argument is completely different when you view health care as a for-profit business.

Regardless of your philosophical views to the contrary, as a Canadian citizen, I do have the 'right to health care.' It may be arbitrary and it may not quite be 'self-evident', but it is my right nonetheless and certainly colours my opinions on related issues.
 

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xpanda said:
And you're right. The argument is completely different when you view health care as a for-profit business.

Regardless of your philosophical views to the contrary, as a Canadian citizen, I do have the 'right to health care.' It may be arbitrary and it may not quite be 'self-evident', but it is my right nonetheless and certainly colours my opinions on related issues.

Your right to health care does not include forcing a doctor into performing a procedure that he/she may find morally repugnant as well as against the Hippocratic Oath.

The abortion rights kooks need to be a bit more careful about the fights they pick; raising hell over something like this isn't a good way to swing public support your way. Are they going to force Catholic schools to distribute condoms next?
 

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Shotgun said:
Your right to health care does not include forcing a doctor into performing a procedure that he/she may find morally repugnant as well as against the Hippocratic Oath.
Here, a doctor cannot refuse treatment, unless ...

The abortion rights kooks need to be a bit more careful about the fights they pick; raising hell over something like this isn't a good way to swing public support your way. Are they going to force Catholic schools to distribute condoms next?
... they work at one of our publicly funded Catholic hospitals, which don't perform abortions at all. Freedom of religion and all. So, no, Catholic schools will not be forced to distribute condoms.

Phaedrus was right. My argument against this is tainted by the fact that I regularly assume that doctors are public servants, since I am conditioned to think that way. In your case, they are not, so their obligations are voluntary.

However, this is undoubtedly yet another move by Bush to undermine abortion rights, one small step at a time. I will be surprised if Roe v. Wade isn't on the table in his coming mandate, especially if the lynching of Specter continues.
 

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posted by xpanda:

Regardless of your philosophical views to the contrary, as a Canadian citizen, I do have the 'right to health care.'
No you don't. You have a promise from the Canadian government that you will receive health care. I can't imagine anything farther away from the premise of a natural right than something which the state promises, without the ability to fulfill.

Jews in Auschwitz had the exact same rights as rich white men in early 19th century Virginia. The only difference is that the degree to which the respective governments of each demograph recognised those rights. The state can't turn on your rights like a switch, any more than it can turn them off. It can only respect them or not, with the added phenomenon since the rise of socialism that the state now reclassifies all manner of needs and wants as "rights," despite having no evident means to make good on such empty promises, and despite the epistemological fact that a right by definiton requires no effort or expenditure on the part of the state or anyone else -- because by definiton your rights center around the ability to do x or say y or have z, without the interference of the state or your fellow citizen.

I am put of mind of Hayek:

The transition from the concept of individual liberty to that of liberty as power has been facilitated by the philosophical tradition that uses the word "restraint" where we would have used "coercion" in defining liberty ... Both aspects are equally important: to be precise, we should probably define liberty as the absence of restraint and constraint. Unfortunately, both these words have come also to be used for influences on human action that do not come from other men; and it is only too easy to pass from defining liberty as the absence of restraint to defining it as the "absence of obstacles to the realisation of our desires" or even more generally "the absence of external impediment." This is equivalent to interpreting it as effective power to do whatever we want.

This reinterpretation of liberty is particularly ominous because it has penetrated deeply into the usage of some of the countries where, in fact, individual freedom is still largely preserved. In the United States it has come to be widely accepted as the foundation for the political philosophy dominant in "liberal" circles. Such recognised intellectual leaders of the "progressives" such as J.R. Commons and John Dewey have spread an ideology in which "liberty is power, effective power to do specific things" and the "demand of liberty is the demand for power," while the absence of coercion is merely "the negative side of freedom" and "is to be prized only as a means to Freedom which is power."
(from The Constitution of Liberty, Chapter I, p.4)

What Hayek is saying, with an abundance of words, is that you have rights, I have rights, all people everywhere have them, but they are as he puts it the "freedom from restraint and constraint." You don't have a right to something which can only be given to you at the expense of someone else's time, money, thought and effort (and what requires a greater expenditure of all of those resources than health care?) You do have a right to not be put in a position to require health care, such as if I went upside your head with a baseball bat (I won't of course, but just for illustrative purposes.) But there is an enormous leap between "freedom from restraint and constraint" and "freedom from external impediment," even if that freedom in practical terms means you die from a completely preventable and/or curable condition, alone and unloved in a ditch. Life is full of nasty suprises (also of wonder, not that anyone ever notices.)


Phaedrus
 

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Good counter, but I'm not swayed. In the first place, I used 'air quotes' around the words 'right to health care' as did you and meant it in the same sarcastic vein as you initially intended. And also why I put the 'self-evident' caveat in there. I understand your philosophical view on 'rights.'

So, I'll argue from a different angle.

What it will always boil down to, so long as our societies can maintain their relative wealth, is that people aren't inclined to let their neighbours die needlessly. We're too communal for that. We'll always offer health care to one another because we're just like that. It turns out, when you're doling out even small amounts of health care, it becomes more efficient and cost-effective to run it as a monopoly by the state. Our relative spending per capita and as a percentage of GDP attest to that.
 

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