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Notes on A Recent Decision

I felt I should say a few things here about the recent Supreme Court decision, especially for those people gloating about it today:

Overturning Roe isn’t about reducing abortions. It’s about punishing women who have them. That’s it. That’s what’s going to happen. There are many things that can be done – and have been proven to work – to reduce abortions. Most of those things involve alleviating poverty: School lunch programs, universal health care, and education. Things that those who have spent 50 years trying to punish women who have abortions have steadfastly fought against that whole time. (They talk about an “epidemic” of abortions, but in real life the number of abortions performed in the United States has declined every year since 1973.)

They’ve already said their next step is to attack contraception. That’s going to increase abortions even more, and thus let them punish even more people for getting pregnant when they don’t want to.

The idea that life begins at conception isn’t biblical. Most versions and most passages (there are many) of the Bible agree that personhood begins at birth – so, you know, later than most current laws have it. (There is an exception: “New International Version” was re-written in 1994 to seem more anti-abortion. I don’t know what was included in the 2014 update – that one wasn’t as infamous.)

“Life begins at conception” was an idea conceived by Jerry Falwell in order to get protestant evangelicals to vote for Ronald Reagan. He took at formerly Catholic article of faith and applied it to Protestants in order to convince them that their religion itself was under attack from “the other side.” It worked so well that every Republican candidate has used it to get religious christians on their side since then, to the point where a lot of people consider Republican to mean the the same as Christian. (And, conversely, anything that’s not Republican to be anti-Christian.)

Points 3 and 4 are completely irrelevant, though, because in the United States, laws aren’t based on the Bible, or any man’s interpretation of it. The Constitution and the First Amendment are quite clear on this point, and we are a democracy (as much as the far right hates that term), not a theocracy.

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