| > Almost all states (and other countries) where abortion is legalized still have reasonable limits on when they may be performed (e.g., not after second trimester). I think we would both agree that an abortion of an otherwise viable and healthy baby one day before expected delivery would be unethical. Your moral compass isn't accounting for the logistics of pregnancy. At any point during a pregnancy or childbirth, complications can arise which risk the mother's life, and a medical decision is most often made to save her instead of a potentially healthy child. By both medical and legal definition, this is still an abortion. To declare that it's not ethical to abort in these situations is a declaration that it is ethical to kill the mother. So, we very much do not agree that the ethics of abortion are obvious or even quantifiable. > Many things people do don’t infringe on my rights. Someone murdering another person doesn’t infringe MY rights, but it is still wrong. A parent beating their child doesn’t infringe my rights but is still abuse. I think you missed the point here, or I wasn't clear enough. Given that the spectrum of ethics doesn't allow for a standard threshold of "murder" and we've already established that abortions are a medical necessity, the only case against the right to abortion boils down to being personally offended by someone else's actions. If medical care can be decided by personal offense and codified into a law that is guaranteed to be harmful, then we don't actually have the freedoms described in the Constitution. > Yes, but we are in disagreement on which rights are applicable in this case. [...] It is not, nor should it ever be, the responsibility of the court to attempt to enshrine a right that does not exist through case law. Freedom of speech protects the moral threshold discussed earlier. Right to privacy protects medical information. Freedom of religion is based on separation of church and state, which means religious beliefs shouldn't hold any bearing at the federal level, particularly because they may directly contradict the beliefs of another religion. These are all fundamental concepts of our democracy, and it is absolutely the court's job to uphold them when challenged. And the case law does exist (it's the one which just got overturned), so even if you were correct about the court's responsibility, then they just did the opposite of what you're purporting that responsibility to be. |