Geezy Truth News (3 May 2022)

A fairly extensive discussion of the reported decision by the US Supreme Court to nullify Roe v. Wade, which I have long believed to be among the wisest decisions ever rendered by SCOTUS. The Court divided the 9 months of pregnancy into three trimesters, during which (it ruled) abortions were unrestrictedly permissible during the first; the states could regulate how they were done (during the second); and that (during the third) they could only be conducted to save the life or the health of the mother. The key distinction was the bestowal of 'personhood' at the stage of viability (end of the second trimester), when the fetus could survive outside the uterine environment, when the first primitive "right to life" attached to the developing fetus. Abortions during the third for any other reason would be prosecutable as murder. What appears (to me) most valuable about Roe is that it leaves the decision up to each woman to decide on the basis of her own personal circumstances: no woman (under Roe) is obligated to have an abortion. Under the Pro-Life alternative, however, were abortions disallowed except under special conditions (such as having been conceived by rape or incest), women are compelled to carry to term even unwanted pregnancies, which (in my view) is a form of reproductive slavery. So, as I see it, the Pro-Choice posiiton is democratic and American, while the Pro-Life positon is not.