The person performing the abortion need not even be a doctor. The truth is, there is nothing preventing someone like Kermit Gosnel from legally setting up shop there, because there is no criminal code pertaining to abortion any longer.

It's appropriate that on a thread about lying about abortion that you chime in lying about New York's abortion laws.

First, read this article, it's free and quite enlightening no matter where you fall on the abortion/IVF issues. To paraphrase his overarching point, he feels to truly be a 'pro-life' supporter one has to believe that life begins at the moment of conception. So both the Alabama ruling about IVF and the Arizona ruling reinstating an 1864 law should find full-throated agreement by everyone claiming to be pro-life. However, that isn't what Trump nor others in the supposed pro-life camps have done. They've all staked new positions far more progressive than supporting the court approved anti-abortion laws.

This is nothing new. But what is new is his willingness to introspectively criticize those of his own ilk for showing that the moment anti-abortion laws might impact individuals they sympathize with, shift to positions which still allow for fetuses to be discriminately terminated. He says he and other true believers are seething at both those they thought were allies and those they already sensed were using the abortion issue to gain political power and demonize groups and people that they didn't like.

On some very salient and revelatory points, he ain't wrong.

When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that I.V.F. embryos were subject to the state's wrongful death statute, it forced the pro-life movement to fully examine the cultural and political implications of its position on unborn children, and pro-life Republicans blinked. They caved, almost instantly, on a core philosophical element of the movement - the incalculable value of every human life no matter how small - and the movement is now standing by or even applauding as Trump is turning the Republican Party into a pro-choice party, one more moderate than the Democrats, but pro-choice still.

While I always respected arguments about the personhood of the baby, I was often frustrated when critics would attribute malign motives to pro-life Americans. But now I'm left wondering how much of the movement was truly real. How much was it really about protecting all human life? And were millions of ostensibly pro-life Americans happy with pro-life laws, only so long as they targeted "them" and imposed no burden at all on "us"?

Philosophically, the movement is breaking. There is no coherent pro-life argument for why a state should prevent women who become pregnant through natural means from destroying an embryo while protecting the ability of families who create an embryo through I.V.F. to either destroy it or keep it frozen indefinitely.

[I]t is probably no coincidence that public support for the pro-life position began a sharp decline after Trump's election. It's hard to argue you're a movement rooted in love when you enthusiastically unite behind a fundamentally hateful man. On Wednesday, Trump reversed his previous position supporting a 20-week ban on abortion; he announced that he would not support a national abortion ban if he wins the presidency, and he said the policy should instead be left up to the states.

Trump's advice to voters was to "follow your heart" and "do what's right for your family, and do what's right for yourself." It's "all about the will of the people," he said. This is the most pro-choice position a Republican presidential candidate has taken since at least Gerald Ford.

I also recognize that many of the critics of the pro-life movement were right all along. When push came to shove, the pro-life position was either secondary to other values or it genuinely was punitively tribal - enthusiastically aimed straight at the supposedly licentious left but ready to be abandoned the instant the commitment to unborn children might endanger the larger MAGA political project. Abortion is the poison pill that Trump doesn't want to swallow.

The older I get, the more I'm convinced that we simply don't know who we are - or what we truly believe - until our values carry a cost. For more than 40 years, the Republican Party has made the case that life begins at conception. Alabama's Supreme Court agreed. Yet the Republican Party can't live with its own philosophy. There is no truly pro-life party in the United States.

Damn Rcade, I posted it a full 10 minutes prior... Sigh.

No you didn't. You've been around here long enough to know that threads moved to the front page carry the timestamp of when they were moved, NOT when they were originally posted on the back page.

Look at the timestamp of post #1: 10:40 AM.

You posted your thread at 11:39 AM, which means you posted a full hour after QCP.

When in fact what happened is TonyRoma posted a thread about how and why Deplorables keep bringing it up.

Correct. And more importantly, why is the former Republican President and current presidential nominee - along with multiple elected Republicans - repeating this lie over and over again?

I truly don't see how so many people choose to ignore lie after lie from Republicans on a myriad of issues - and I'm not referring to the usual political or policy differences. I'm referring to only lies that can be documented as such by any rudimentary search of the substantiated facts and evidence proving them so.

And one more aspect of the anti-abortion faction's penchant for negative framing.

Republican legislators really think it's bad when a woman gets to choose if she would rather have kid or have an abortion.

In most circumstances the decision whether or not to have an abortion is a medical decision based upon health concerns regarding either the mother, child, or both, influencing whether the fetus should be brought to full term in conjunction with the counsel of the very doctors trying to provide the prenatal care required to birth a healthy baby.

This is nowhere near any realm of advocating selective "abortion up to the moment of birth" or "infantricide" as Republican politicans wrongly and proudly exclaim, simply to inflame the emotions of those that they're lying to.

On topic:

Republicans want more babies, pass draconian laws, get less babies.

This is so true. I have a retired nurse friend whose daughter recently got married. All involved live in Missouri. The daughter would like to get pregnant but is fearful for what might happen should she have complications or a natural miscarriage.

Illegalizing healthcare options is absolutely having a chilling effect on millions of women now reading horror stories about wanted pregnancies turned into nightmares due to states placing themselves between expectant woman, their doctors, and the ability to receive timely and necessary medical services should the need arise.

It's still up on X.

Don't forget, Trump and his acolytes "love" the poorly educated. Lake is just virtue signalling to the tribe.

I think abortion needs to be legal in the first trimester.

Good for you. Then don't have one yourself after 6 weeks of your pregnancy. I'm 100% in your corner in allowing you to make that decision without any input from me or any other American.

Too bad you don't understand everyone should be allowed to make their own decision about it just like you did.

In this country limitless abortion is an extreme position.

As it's been proven to you again and again, actual late term abortions RARELY happen and in almost every instance they occur because people who WANT THEIR BABY find out that the baby cannot survive birth or ex vitro, or the mother cannot survive the physical rigors or difficulties of the specific birth for which abortion is being considered.

These decisions should be left up to doctors and the families involved PERIOD. The state has no business in legislating who can or cannot receive the medical care that they desire. There should never be a legal impediment nor sanction against anyone's choice regarding the health and well being of their own body.

Bingo.

What allies of Donald Trump claim happened was, in reality, a response to that Russian effort. Federal officials (the "national security state," if you prefer) discovered signs that Russia sought to influence the results and began investigating - including various points of contact between Russian actors and Trump's campaign.

Trump, eager to reinforce that he had won the presidency thanks to his excellence and not foreign help, immediately cast this probe as an effort to subvert him and his administration. He and his allies worked feverishly to offset new developments in the investigation with a narrative about nefarious "deep state" actors desperate to hobble him. This line of argument was investigated by the inspector general for the Justice Department and by a special counsel specifically tasked with proving that Trump was unfairly probed; in neither case was that idea substantiated.

That experience from 2016, though, helped national security officials develop a plan to prevent similar interference efforts in 2020.

In October 2020, there was suddenly another information dump: The New York Post (after Fox News passed) used information purportedly obtained from a laptop owned by Joe Biden's son Hunter to obliquely allege wrongdoing by the Democratic candidate. Social media companies briefly limited access to the story out of concern that it was another influence effort, but they soon reversed those limits.

For Trump allies and sympathizers, the narrative is generally that the feds tried to silence the laptop story, another example of the "national security state" meddling in an election. But there is no evidence that federal actors tried to muffle the story. Instead, social media executives have testified that their motivation was to "avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016" - giving oxygen to a foreign interference effort.

The information was sourced back to Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who had been actively involved in trying to dig up dirt on Joe Biden - including some offered by foreign actors - for more than a year. One of Giuliani's partners in that effort had been sanctioned as a Russian agent the previous month. A Time article published soon after the laptop story broke reported that information allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden was being offered for sale in Europe in 2019.

Regardless of its backstory, it was the laptop that was the effort to upend the election, not the response. The direct effort to affect the outcome of the race was not a function of what the federal government was doing; it was, instead, a function of what Giuliani was doing on behalf of his boss.

It doesn't get more insidious than those who've been shown the truth and presented with incontrovertible receipts continue to baselessly blame law enforcement and counterintelligence officials of this nation - adding false credence to our enemy's corrosive disinformation campaign. Those who continue down this path should be highlighted and spurned for the anti-America animus of their deceit, always trying to blame those responding to the false attacks and absolving the perpetrators by shamefully and continually shifting the blame.

Oddly enough, religious arguments convince me the least. If there is God and a soul, heaven and all that - it doesn't even matter does it?

Even more oddly, we consider a heartbeating body without brain activity to be "dead" and allow that person's proxy to end any artificial life support, knowing that the body will expire.

I wonder why measurable in vitro brain activity isn't the red-line deliniation where an embryonic clump of dividing cells actually displays signs of probable life.

But more importantly is the fact that in death we admit that the physical body is simply a vessel for consciousness/interactive life/soul. Does destroying the vessel destroy the soul? No one believes that, and in that immutable truth may lie the reason the Christian bible does not contain a single reference to life beginning at conception nor deeming human intervention in terminating an in vitro embryo as an act of murder as determined by the Fifth Commandment.

My Roman Catholic orthodoxy taught me that souls are infinite and that the death of the body is not the death of the soul. If that is one's belief, then how does that square with abortion being the cessation of "life" when the body itself is not physically connected to the eternal soul?

Is it your position that the US needs to be less like Europe?

My position is one of common ------- sense, something you show little of when pimping your little VAT love.

European countries don't have minimum wages last raised when W was President. European countries don't have their governments controlled by monied elites who game their taxation systems to benefit the wealthiest citizens because their highest Court considers spending money to affect societal change is equivalent to "free speech." The US taxpayers already subsidize employers by acting as social backstops for companies always claiming that the cost of labor is too high while pocketing tax break after tax break and subsidy after subsidy.

Newsflash: Poor people pay taxes too, so even they are invisibly impacted by our imbalanced system.

And the biggest difference? Europeans have taken health insurance off the plates of business and placed it into the perview of government. American workers already struggle just to afford health insurance costs that Europeans workers don't.

The impediment to any US VAT lies with the reality that we don't have socialized health insurance removing the trillions of non-productive dollars sucked up by middlemen that don't deliver a single tangible benefit to healthcare delivery nor service provision.

It's also a tax that is almost impossible to avoid if you want to buy consumer goods.

Which is the precise reason the U.S. will NEVER adopt one. VATs are the most regressive taxes on the planet because those with the least wealth and income spend all or almost all of their income on goods and services - which means the poorest would be paying the highest percentage of their wealth/income in taxes just so the wealthier can escape meaningful taxation on all the revenue and wealth their investments generate.

Why not just bring back indentured servitude instead? There's barely a discernable difference. VATs will increase poverty, further exacerbate income/wealth inequality, and cause a drop in GDP because you're taking money out of the consumer economy that will not be replaced by the wealthy who already consume whatever they want anyway.

Those with the least contribute what they can least afford so that the wealthy skate by with their non-labor generated income virtually tax free. What a concept.

When I saw the word "Hunter" I assumed this had to be about Hunter Biden.
Nope.

Carry on.

Is inflation helping people?

Global inflation - which was and remains higher than in the U.S. - was not caused by pandemic relief. Pandemic relief kept tens of millions of Americans from losing their homes and helped to keep families fed when the worst effects of covid took hold and forced massed unemployment heretofore not seen since the Great Depression. And how long did that last without any appreciable stimulative help from the federal government?

We didn't see Americans starving in the streets and we didn't see an avalanche of foreclosures and evictions due to the help our government provided that ultimately went into the pockets of business owners, lenders, and landlords in lieu of the income many no longer had.

Pandemic relief was a matter of life or death and for once we had a Republican (Trump) understanding this dynamic even if it was more about his own personal political dynamics than it was based on logic and the economic reality that the only way to avoid a large recession is for government to temporarily replace much of the GDP lost by the economic slowdown.

Republicans like Trump and Murphy seriously expect voters to believe that there are women, medical professionals, and Democratic policymakers who "want abortion literally when the child is coming out of the birth canal." That's insane. There are no such people.

The problem, in other words, isn't just that guys like Trump and Murphy are lying. The problem is made worse by the fact that they feel like they need to lie in order to prevent more election defeats.

When you've got a sociopathic conman and ignoramous leading your party, his complete lack of integrity and constant reliance on party-over-all and projecting his own perversities upon perceived "enemies," this is where it leads.

I thought Biden was in PA in 1864.

I think it would be funny if Biden claims (tongue-in-cheek) that he personally tried to talk Arizonan men out of passing this law back in 1864 but they wouldn't listen to him.

Why this is so important on the national level:

I was pointing out that 275 Democrats did exactly what Trump told them to do.

As I already stated to those with functioning comprehension, the Democrats did what THEY wanted to do to help the American people regardless of Trump. The GOP controlled the Senate, so if Republicans wanted to stop this bill they had all the power to do so.

Only a moron keeps howling at the moon and blaming it for chasing the sun out of the sky. NO legislation that actually helps anyone but the wealthy receives backing by a majority of Republicans even when their own leader demands it. Again, have you been asleep since 2020 because the same is true today. If it were up to House Republican votes, there would be no budget, a shutdown government, and a debt default.

Republicans are the posterchildren of irresponsible, selfish and xenophobic governmental policy and most wear it as a badge of pride.

Today, six years after the pullout, Tehran has bolted past nearly all the pact's constraints on the amount and type of enriched uranium it can possess, IAEA documents show.

In factory chambers that had ceased making enriched uranium under a 2015 nuclear accord, the inspectors now witnessed frenzied activity: newly installed equipment, producing enriched uranium at ever faster speeds, and an expansion underway that could soon double the plant's output. More worryingly, Fordow was scaling up production of a more dangerous form of nuclear fuel - a kind of highly enriched uranium, just shy of weapons grade. Iranian officials in charge of the plant, meanwhile, had begun talking openly about achieving "deterrence," suggesting that Tehran now had everything it needed to build a bomb if it chose.

Fordow's transformation mirrors changes seen elsewhere in the country as Iran blows past the guardrails of the Iran nuclear accord.

While Iran says it has no plans to make nuclear weapons, it now has a supply of highly enriched uranium that could be converted to weapons-grade fuel for at least three bombs in a time frame ranging from a few days to a few weeks, current and former officials said. The making of a crude nuclear device could follow in as little as six months after a decision is made, while overcoming the challenges of building a nuclear warhead deliverable by a missile would take longer, perhaps two years or more, the officials said.

Heck of a job, idiots.

You've got to be kidding me.

Please. All this confirms is that you have no integrity nor honesty in your entire body. You are nothing but a simp masquerading as a sentient person, incapable of thinking or analysis beyond the level of a troglodyte.

Of course Democrats wanted to help struggling Americans trying to survive through a global pandemic. The misfortunate reality is that there were 134 RepubliCANTS who wouldn't lift a finger in such an effort, a sentiment you selfishly share.

So go ahead and flag this post Funny you sorry little clownman. You're as predictable as sunrise and sunset.

You mean "congress" was injecting trillions?

That Trump demanded that they do. Are you that forgetful of something that happened only 4 years ago right in front of God and man?