Trying to connect banning abortion to “fascism” is a weird angle. Abortion was illegal in the principal allied countries that defeated Nazi Germany: the U.S., U.K., and Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had legalized abortion in the 1920s, but banned it again in time to fight and defeat the Nazis.
That is a really poorly thought out argument. Taking away existing rights and suppressing any discussion or dissemination of information that doesn’t align with the ruling party’s beliefs doesn’t strike you as fascist in its approach?
Regulating a medical procedure and suppressing online sources of information about illegal procedures may conflict with certain libertarian beliefs, but it’s not “fascist.” By your reasoning, it’s “fascist” for Germany to take away people’s right of free association by banning Nazi parties, and to suppress discussion of Nazism. But nobody thinks that.
The crux of your disagreement with what Texas is doing isn’t about the methods. It’s about your substantive disagreement regarding the morality of killing a human fetus.
Again a weak argument, your previous one was so bad you had to delete it and come up with a new bad analogy?
This is not regulating a medical procedure, it is inserting politics into a medical decision. It has nothing to do with medicine. It is forcing your beliefs on other people. There are valid reasons to regulate abortion, this is obviously not one at all, it will just result in worse health outcomes. And blocking any discussion of what is a legal and scientific procedure in other states is text-book fascist and as un-American as it can get.
Texas has chosen to ban a medical procedure that kills a human fetus after a certain stage of development. It has done so based on moral judgments about when killing a human fetus should be permitted, and when it should be prohibited.
Virtually every liberal democracy does the same thing. They just pick a different developmental milestone. There is no scientific reason why Denmark or Germany’s 12-week ban is more justifiable than Texas’s 12-week ban. And those countries insert moral judgments into regulation of other medical procedures, everything from euthanasia to female circumcision.
Your regurgitation of libertarian talking points misses the mark. Virtually every liberal democracy recognizes that society can make judgments about what's right and wrong, and regulate individual conduct based on those judgments. (And outside the U.S., most liberal democracies recognize the right of the government to suppress information that society deems harmful.) None of that is "fascist."
> There is no scientific reason why Denmark or Germany’s 12-week ban [permitted if mother's life or health in danger or for other reasons, per Wikipedia] is more justifiable than Texas’s 12-week ban.
It's not a purely-scientific question. Blackmun got it approximately right in Roe v. Wade.
Right, it’s not a purely scientific question. It’s impossible to extricate moral judgments from the question. Which is why Texas drawing the line at 6 weeks isn’t “fascist.”
Blackmun was a libertarian who snuck onto the court during the bad old days when the GOP failed to vet their judicial appointments. As professor Ely wrote: Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Roe was uniquely indefensible, having no basis in constitutional text, long-standing tradition, original intent, international consensus, or public opinion either then or now. Half a century after Roe was authored, most people even in liberal democracies still think you shouldn’t be able to kill a fetus with a face absent risks to the mother’s health.
And abortion was criminalized for “Aryan” women in Nazi Germany and the countries it occupied, not just for the providers, but the women themselves, many of whom had been raped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Germany
And at the same time, they forced many women to have abortions.
The big difference between pro-choicers and forced-birthers is that both of those things are offensive to us. The latter is a bigger horror to me, personally, but think for a minute about a young Dutch woman forced to carry the baby of the occupying soldier she wouldn’t dare have said no to - and how she and that baby would have been treated by her village for years after.
> The big difference between pro-choicers and forced-birthers is that both of those things are offensive to us
The vast majority of liberal democracies are “forced birth” by your standard. Virtually none embrace a “rights”-based approach to abortion. Denmark will force women to give birth after the fetus has a face. Abortion is still technically illegal in the UK and Germany, though there is a defense under certain circumstances in the UK and it’s decriminalized in Germany.
In practice abortion isn’t about whether the state can force a woman to give birth. Almost every country recognizes that it can. In practice it’s about legislative compromise, and moral judgments as to stages of fetal development.
What’s not “intelligent” is reducing everything to a scale of libertarianism versus “fascism.” Countries have more or less restrictions on abortion not because they are more or less “fascist,” but because they place more or less emphasis on reproduction as a fundamental social good. So abortion is heavily restricted in places that are objectively left wing, such as Palestine. While it’s widely embraced in authoritarian regimes like China. That’s why abortion was both made legal shortly after the communist revolution in Russia, but made illegal again when the country became worried about population on the eve of World War II.
Even the most liberal social democracies in the world today ban abortion well before birth. Is that a mark of “fascism?” Both Denmark and Texas, after all, recognize the prerogative of the state to require a woman to carry a pregnancy to term. They simply have a different set of exceptions for when they will exercise that power.
Palestinian nationalism, and Arab nationalism more generally, is closely linked to socialism. Arafat was a socialist. Both of the largest PLO parties historically, Fatah and Popular Front, are socialist or social-Democratic parties.
