Comment by coward123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coward123 | Hacker News Reader

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Consider this a bit of code switching. Many of us absolutely are concerned about what this means for women, but we also know that this forum skews male and a particular kind of male. So we are making the argument here that resonates with this forum.

You are right though that more people overall - even those who skew conservative and pro-individual rights, should realize that if you take away rights from women, and then homosexuals, and then people who want to be married to someone of a different race... where does it end in terms of stripping away individual rights? I'd argue that if you view women's health care as a matter of individual freedom and rights, then is that not the same argument being made in interpreting the 2nd amendment as not about militias (IE: a standing army) but the rights of the individual? If I can tell women they can't have a set of health care services, what's stopping the government from telling men that they can't have a different set of health care services?

Rights has a very specific meaning in the US legal system. Abortion is not listed as a right in the Constitution, and it therefore is not a federal right.

We can argue that it should be, but now we're talking about an ammendment, which is legally necessary and the real conversation the nation should be having.

*I don't think it could ever qualify as a right. Rights are negative, not positive. You could not guarantee the right to an abortion because now you're guaranteeing someone to the right to have someone else do work for them. Instead, it would need to be enumerated as a negative right, meaning that there would be federal protection against the outlawing of abortions.

>> is that not the same argument being made in interpreting the 2nd amendment as not about militias (IE: a standing army) but the rights of the individual?

Militia does not mean standing army. From the Supreme Court Heller decision https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf, page 2:

"The “militia” comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens’ militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved."

You can read pages 1 and 2 of that decision to see the summary of the Supreme Court's argument for why 2nd Amendment rights are individual rights.

There are many that would say Heller was an activist court making up law and completely overlooked precedent in Miller, in the same way the current court is overturning decades of precedent in another issue.

The court addressed that in Heller:

"United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174, does not limit the right to keep and bear arms to militia purposes, but rather limits the type of weapon to which the right applies to those used by the militia, i.e., those in common use for lawful purposes."

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