230 Comments

Two thousand or so years ago, a woman conceived and gave birth to a baby and no man was involved. Otherwise, conception has always required a male as well as a female. Based on the various descriptions of proposed anti-abortion laws and various trigger laws waiting for Roe to be overturned, the male's role seems to have been overlooked (gosh, could it be on purpose?).

If the goal is to criminalize abortion, why does the burden fall only on the woman? It takes two to make a baby and, if there are going to be laws penalizing the mother, they should also apply to the father. If such equal treatment was baked into the various proposed and triggered laws, I doubt any of them would see the light of day.

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Greg Norman—STAY IN YOUR LANE

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My thoughts exactly, minus a mix of my favorite obscenities

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Yes, I chopped up your mother after I slit her throat. But the boss was all over my ass today and I come home and she stands up in front of the T.V. just as Aaron Judge hits a walk off home run.... We all make mistakes.

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Shumer's leadership has been a joke. His main concern seems to be keeping AOC from primarying him.

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1. If there is no penalty for this then there are no rules, and they can keep going until they are successful.

2. It appears there is no impetus to put in place rules to prevent this from happening again.

In 2025 we'll be on trucks to the work camps and some guy will be telling me, 'Don't worry, the indictments are coming.'

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Old white guy doesn't know what the hell he's doing. And he consults with no one. It's something Schumer has in common with Donald Trump.

By the way, don't mislead people as to how ectopic pregnancies are treated. They are not abortions, but are emergency surgeries to remove the fallopian tube before it ruptures and kills the woman. They have never been "abortions," but are a procedure that is performed when the fertilized egg implants inside the fallopian tube and grows into an embryo. The tube is about the width of a strand of angel hair spaghetti. Nothing can grow there, but if it ruptures, there would be internal hemorrhaging. I have known 2 women who had ectopic pregnancies, and they both were in extreme agony.

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Very true. And an ectopic "pregnancy" has absolutely NO chance of coming to term, only of killing the woman. That's why I, a pro-lifer, put the word in quotes. We need a new word for it, because a condition with zero chance of coming to term with a birth shouldn't even be part of this discussion.

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We don't need a new word for it. We need to get overzealous anti-choice fanatics to stop being ignorant about women's bodies and pregnancy. Because ectopic pregnancy is a pregnancy. The only way it happens is as a result of a male's sperm meeting a female's egg and fertilizing it. That results in an embryo growing inside the fallopian tube instead of descending to the uterus and implanting itself there.. There are many instances of pregnancy being deadly.

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I don't mean to get tendentious about it, but to my mind, there's a pregnancy when an embryo implants in the uterine wall. We'll never know how many embryos fail to implant, and we wouldn't count those as "abortions" even if we did. An embryo growing in the fallopian tube is like that. It can never be a baby but stands a very good chance of killing the woman: both sides should be able to agree that that situation belongs outside the debate over abortion.

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But I guess that still glosses over the point. The conservatives that do not think abortion should be legal in case of the life of the mother, presumably don't care if the pregnancy is ectopic or not. God's way you know....

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Sure, shouldn't be, but it is because the Christian Nationalists don't actually give a shit.

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What is funny is ask how many of these Christian Nationalists would support a law that would require men to even donate blood to save their children. But yeah, it is all about being pro life....

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Schumer demonstrates much of why Democrats are losing today. Unlike Pelosi he is not a strategist. He needs to be replaced

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Charlie, this helps clarify for me the issues I hadn't seen with the current bill. What is missing is there is no chance to debate and find compromises between the two parties. I'm just tired of the constant my way or not at all.

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If we can't have the Canadian model of no abortion law, women are smart enough to figure that out for themselves, then I suggest this, and only this, alternative:

"Abortion is legal for any reason up to 24 weeks. Abortion is legal from 24 weeks until birth only to save the life of the mother, end the medical suffering of the child, or both. Those rights shall not be infringed by the United States or the various States."

There. Did what Americans actually want in three sentences. This desire also reflects what American women DO: 91 percent of abortions are performed early, and 1 percent, almost all due to medical emergencies, are performed late.

This mirrors the no-abortion-laws Canadian experience: 90 percent are early and 1 percent are late. This without a single, solitary abortion law on the books; Canada eliminated its ban in 1969 and handed female citizens the sole power to decide. On the provider side, doctors can legally perform abortions for any reason until birth . . . but don't. They provide abortions for any reason for twenty-four weeks--first and second trimester--but after that, only for medical emergencies with mother or child.

The thoughtful weighing of mother's and child's competing needs are baked into Canada's culture. It's baked into ours, too, but our politicians get in the way. When given the absolute freedom to choose in a way our cultures consider reasonable, women and doctors do. To say American women and doctors are incapable of choosing just as wisely is not just a lie, but a damned lie.

%$#@ a bunch of Puritan congressmen who won't let us have nice things.

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Excellent. We really do make things unnecessarily difficult in the Dis-United States. I get the sense our culture and political system favors conflict.

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Thanks, GG. Politicians and media make serious money from conflict, so they jack it up to the nth degree. Our culture likes to be entertained, so we keep electing the creeps who holler and storm.

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She is too far right for me.But she is a profile in courage which is solely lacking today.As an avid reader of The Bulwark and listener of their podcast, we need all the help in dealing with Trumpism. Dave Y

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Charlie, You are soooo right!. Shumer never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. As usual he allows the radical left minority to lead him around by his nose, lose votes and popularity for his party - which is all that stands between America and theocratic fascist state. One giant step forward would be for the Senate Dems to remove Shumer from leadership and elect a competent leader.

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So let's say Schumer puts up Collins' and Murkowski's "codify Roe" bill- it's not going to get any more votes. Sure, it might get Manchin, Collins, and Murkowski- which is still nowhere near enough to get it passed. What other R is going to vote for it, for the "reasonable moderate" bill? Exactly none of them.

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Go Dan Crenshaw (for once).

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The idea that the Senate will be able to settle on a bill protecting reproductive rights is a fantasy because of the structure of our representative system and the complexity and emotional and religious aspects of the issue. It’s better to accept censure and eye rolling over political malpractice and a “loss” now than suffer a more dramatic loss later after a prolonged public battle. Democrats lose on this issue when the spotlight falls on Manchin in the Senate.

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Once again, we find that the esteemed, majority male bodies of the US Supreme Court, (at least it seems that five plus one of them, the plus one being the well-known Clerk Ginni Thomas)- and that other bastion of in-depth deliberative discussion, comprised mainly of older male bodies, the US Senate, have determined how things in this great country should work as we move forward as a country. Two notable things that have come from these men in recent years. A corporation is a person, for example, and entitled to the same protections under the Constitution as any other citizen. So, corporations can do pretty much what they want as long as they are doing what a citizen is allowed to do legally. Now, if you happen to be a woman, these men have a bt of a different idea about how you should conduct your life. It is their opinion that they have a far better grasp on what is best fo them than they have themselves. My suggestion is that perhaps women should incorporate. Maybe then their rights would be better protected.

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