Texans overwhelmingly traveled out-of-state to get abortions after state ban
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I'm just disappointed that companies didn't protest as strongly as they did with NC's bathroom bill.
This is the beauty of states rights vs federal laws.
The states change, based on the merit of the idea, not a federal law forcing it upon them.
Over time sentiment will shift organically towards abortion approval, if it's a good enough idea for Texans.
There's a good chance Mask mandates and COVID restrictions would have been permanent if it was federal law.
The freedom of ideas given via states rights allows for a wide variety of ideas to be tested which allows the best ideas to be selected.
Instead of a federal law that stamps out any ideas but one.
Thank goodness the rational headed members of the Surpreme court ruled against vaccine mandates as well despite Sotomayor falsely claiming that there's 100,000 children on ventilators.
Do you have any evidence this is the case? Current federal institutions have fluctuated their guidelines, the opposite of permanency.
It took the brave governors of Texas and Florida to open up during a time of mass sensationalism and demonization to show that it wasn't as bad as the liberal states were predicting.
With the Liberals taking both branches of federal congress and the presidency it doesn't take a rocket scientist to put two and two together.
They tried to put through a federal vaccine mandate which was struck down by the courts on grounds of....federal overreach.
And now thanks to conservative governors and states rights we can all live our normal lives again because everyone is falling in line with those conservative states who were brave enough to stand up against the crazy liberal policies.
This applies to defunding the police as well. Many of the liberal states that implemented defunding the police are changing that as well.
Sensational policy making appears to be a pattern with liberal states which is why states rights are beautiful. It highlights poor policy making.
It is a double edged sword though because liberal states have many good policies.
The point is having a variety in policies leads to richer, better governing.
Florida hasn't done very well with COVID [1].
http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
California and New York lifted their covid restrictions the past few weeks... even though the pandemic is not over...
Florida and Texas were right.
[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
Still higher than most of the pandemic over the last two years.
They're lifting them because they're realizing the restrictions are pointless and hopeless.
Which means they were wrong all along and Tx and FL were right.
If the Texas governor was so brave why was the Texas governors mansion closed for public tours for the official reason of protecting his family from Covid?
And New York and California are still lifting covid restrictions.
State's are realizing that Florida and Texas were right from the beginning and copying them.
Maybe now the approach makes more sense since vaccination rates are higher but it certainly did not at the time.
Deaths are between 1500 and 2000 a day across the U.S..... higher than all but 3 to 5 months of the 2 year pandemic.
The people who are going for misinformed political brownie points are the Liberal states who know if they don't lift the covid restrictions during a voting year they will be removed from office which is extremely sick and hypocritical if you ask me, especially after demonizing republicans who stuck to their priniciples.
If legal slavery was a federal law, it would still exist today.
The beauty of states rights is that there's context to see why something is good or bad.
Rather than the despotic federal boot that crushes any dissent.
Perhaps if the confederacy had won, given that the confederate government did institute laws to that effect upon its member states: confederate states were not allowed to aid or abet fugitive slaves.
Confederate Statutes, Chapter 19, Section 50.
But they didn't, and the United States government explicitly abolished slavery (despite some states wanting it, and some states not) that we don't have slavery in the US, not even in the states which embrace confederacy ideals today.
And, not having slavery? That's a good thing. Thanks, US Government.
Regardless, I think slavery is a dreadful example because it leaves the definition of personhood up to individual states and that is ridiculous.
Slavery does not even fit in to those basic fundamental Bill of Rights.
Similarly it’s very strange to advocate that at some point a majority will just hand over rights to minorities. That’s really not the practice of oppressive systems like regulating peoples bodies.
Even harder if it's a federal law
The secular case does not, with https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/11/29/the-secul... being the only treatment of it that I have seen. Worth a read regardless of one's personal stance on the topic.
Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
"Despite considerable declines in recent decades, the U.S. adolescent pregnancy rate, at 57 per 1,000 in 2010, is the highest in the developed world outside the former Soviet Bloc. The next highest rate is in New Zealand (51 in 2010)."
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/adolescent-pregnancy-a...
That said, it probably has a lot to do with pregnancy rates. Singapore has a very low rate yet access is pretty wide open. Most of that a legacy due to fear of overpopulation (they had a “stop at 2” policy for quite and while and like China, are now panicking about low birth rates).
They're... not though? Your entire premise doesn't seem to have any basis here, see ex. [0]. The US rate doesn't look dramatically different than anywhere else. It's almost identical to Sweden or Australia. Plenty of Eastern European and Asian countries are higher. The US doesn't even make the top 10. France and England are lower but not dramatically so. And a lot of the countries that claim it's low in official stats are clearly full of it, with abortions merely happening illicitly with no report.
0: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_pregnancy#Epidemiol...
Unintended pregnancies (UPs) per 1000 women ages 15–44 years old by year and region:
- 1990-1994: 66 European average vs. 50 in North America
- 2010-2014: 41 European average vs. 47 in North America
Specific countries report numbers differently:
- Britain 2013 "16% of British pregnancies are unplanned, 29% are ambivalent, and are 55% planned"
- France 2008 "33% of pregnancies are unintended"
- Sweden 2013 "12% of pregnancies were fairly or very unplanned"
- USA "slightly less than half (45%) of U.S. pregnancies in 2011 were unintended".
Of course, UPs are not the same as abortions. Many abortions are due to an UP (USA: "Over 92% of abortions are the result of unintended pregnancy"), but not all UPs result in abortions (USA: "In 2001, 44% of unintended pregnancies resulted in births, 42% resulted in induced abortion, and the rest in miscarriage.").
Looking just at abortions, Estonia has the fourth-highest* rate with 33.3 whereas Belgium has the lowest at 7.3. Europe is all over the place (and it's not as if abortions are illegal or deemed immoral in Belgium, quite the opposite). USA is at 20.8. These figures are per 1000 women from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
So are abortions "so common"? Dunno, it seems quite high when looking at a the area I'm from (max(NL/BE/DE)=10) but it's also not through the roof.
* Most countries don't have a known value for abortions though, like most of Africa/Latam/Southeast Asia and all of South America, so take "fourth highest" with a huge grain of salt.
Furthermore, birth control is not 100%. You can do everything right and still get pregnant.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_U...
Some in the Republican party want states to be able to ban birth control as well. [1]
[1] https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/...
EDIT: Link to PDF about sex education in Texas https://tfn.org/cms/assets/uploads/2015/11/Report_final_web....
Holy shit, that's even more backwards than my poor backwater Eastern European country where the Orthodox church still has big influence. Teaching sex-ed to kids and giving them free condoms is becoming the norm.
How is this possible in such a wealthy, educated and developed country?
No alcohol before 21, no sex before 18, etc., American kids must be going nuts over there.
This was unpopular enough with the rest of his party that he had to give up on it. One of the main objections was that since HPV is sexually transmitted protecting against it would encourage kids to have sex.
That is of course a ridiculous objection. You'd be hard pressed to find an actual horny teen couple for whom the risk that sex would lead to cervical cancer 30 years later would be something they would consider when deciding how far to go.
Regular birth control measures are available. You might not be able to afford it, though, for example: If you'd rather have birth control pills, you need to be able to afford a visit to a doctor first and that doctor may require a pelvic exam even though it isn't necessary for it. Condoms are sold at most gas stations, pharmacies, and grocery stores but I'm not aware if they'll send you condoms for free. You don't have a right to sterilisation (even after 25), so a doctor can simply refuse (it isn't unheard of for a doctor to tell a woman no if she doesn't have children - even if it will improve her health - or require her to talk to her husband about it).
You also have a situation with poor sex education. So while condoms are available, how to use them properly isn't as known. Instead of information, you generally get slut shamed and told you need to wait until marriage, and then the message is that birth control isn't an issue for you then. A lot of time was taken to tell us about diseases, too, but not necessarily that some are fairly easily treated or aren't as horrible as they made it seem.
"The United States ranks first among developed nations in rates of both teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. In an effort to reduce these rates, the U.S. government has funded abstinence-only sex education programs for more than a decade. However, a public controversy remains over whether this investment has been successful and whether these programs should be continued. Using the most recent national data (2005) from all U.S. states with information on sex education laws or policies (N = 48), we show that increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_abortion_...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
which does show many comparable countries, but it seems like much of the info is from ~10-15 years ago.
Here's a Google search result for per-capita data: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-....
The US is not noticeably better or worse than other countries supplying data; certainly in the same ballpark as the UK, Canada and Sweden. The US is much larger than those countries in absolute population, so the raw # is larger.
There's likely more variance, though, since some groups and individuals are much less likely to abort, whereas others are much more likely. The latter involves, partly: contraceptive perceptions, access, poverty, among others.