Abortions

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The Supreme Court should not be making laws, that is the Senate and House of Representatives job. As soon as the Supreme Court offered the ruling in Roe v Wade, Congress should have confirmed it by adding it to the laws themselves. It is time to sort this out the correct way.

Automatically Approved Outliers

Abortions should automatically be approved/allowed under the following conditions:

• Pregnancy results from rape or incest (limited to the national maximum time lapsed)
• A competent, licensed physician determines that the life or health of the mother is in serious jeopardy
• A competent, licensed physician determines that the fetus has severe defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth.

The hard/soft line

Beyond those three conditions is where the nation needs discussion. It is practical to say that the majority would agree to not let a woman eight and half months pregnant receive an abortion because she wants to look better in a swimsuit. This also means the majority would agree there should be a hard or soft line somewhere to disallow abortions. Given the line being discussed is a fetus on one side, and the killing of a child on the other, that is not a line a normal, intelligent person would want to play chicken with. So for the purposes of this new law, the country should err on the side of caution on behalf of the child. The heart develops around the 24 week mark of development, but the brain begins development as early as week 3 with neurons forming around week 6. Week 6 or 7 is also around when nerves begin to form and spread through the body which can feel pain. This creates a natural soft line around week 6 to disallow abortions for use as a contraception device. On a secondary scale, this is also late enough for a woman to notice she hasn't had her cycle and may need to look into available options past this point.

It should also be agreed by the majority that a woman not pregnant should be allowed to take any medication or procedure she wants or feels she needs. It can take about 36 hours to 5 days for the two gametes to get together and form a zygote (initial pregnancy). Anything before then is essentially a thorough cleaning. Many would argue about the potential for human life at this point, but laws should not be made about the potential of things to come, but rather based on what is happening or has already happened. There are books and movies aplenty about government organizations or police stopping "future crimes" through sci-fi means and how these inevitably fall short. Laws should govern what is happening, and what has happened, not what will or may happen. Currently the pregnancy rate for America is 83 pregnancies per 1000 women in a year. The odds of correctly picking all 83 pregnant women from that 1000 is a number so small, the average calculator will respond as 0. Which means with 1000 women lined up, there is no evidence of a non-invasive way to tell which 83 are pregnant within the first week of their pregnancies, neither doctors, or the potential mothers will register as pregnant by any current methods. Even standard urine tests don't work until 10-14 days, and competent physicians agree the urine tests are fairly accurate as first indications. Therefore, a soft line can be drawn at 7-10 days to allow prior abortion practices.

With these two soft lines created, the federal law should allow states to create state laws within these guidelines for their abortion legal limits. Always allowing abortions within the three above conditions (pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, jeopardizing the life of the mother, or defects preventing survivability beyond birth), and creating a hard legal line on their own between the first and 6th week. If there are no laws on the state's books, then the federal limit applies at 6 weeks to prevent future abortions. This allows variance between the states based on the citizens of each state to choose, saves lives, allow women specific control over their bodies, prevents excessive federal overreach, and is a middle approach to the two philosophical/religious/political sides of this argument.

Individuals may disagree with the above based on the "my body, my choice" ideology. They believe in a hard line that a parent can have autonomy and freedom of choice and consequences from an activity that involves more than one person. But anyone demanding that the mother have the option to withdraw from future parenthood without any input from the father, they must likewise allow the father to withdraw from any future involvement of parenthood without any input from the mother. Their ideology breaks down as these individuals also demand the father continue to pay for the child's future should the mother choose to keep the child without the father's input. But they should not be allowed to have it both ways, either a parent can opt out of any future involvement, or both parents must provide for the child to the best of their ability (even if the best thing for the child is to be given up for adoption).