Why do you oppose allowing states to decide their own abortion laws?

If you want to live in a state that allows abortion, you are free to reside in that state. If a woman wants an abortion, they are free to travel to that state and get an abortion. The tenth amendment gives states some degree of sovereignty:

[b]The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. [/b]

If it's not in the constitution, which abortion isn't, it's left up to the state to decide - as long as state laws don't violate the constitution. A woman's right to protect her own life is a constitutional right. All states that have abortion laws have a provision that allows women to terminate their pregnancy in those life-threatening situations. Beyond that, there's nothing in the constitution that would give a woman the right to murder her own baby.

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CopperCicada · M

At the one level I really don’t have a problem with states legislating the own abortion laws.

What bothers me is OB-GYN’s being unwilling to treat complex pregnancies because they are worried state abortion laws, which can be quite specific, will take their licenses and/or put them in prison. As an example, ectopic pregnancies. There is no standing state abortion law that bans treating ectopic pregnancies. Yet in some cases hospitals and doctors are reluctant to treat such things less they cross the line in the eyes of some observer. Of course there is no statutory basis for this. But of course this exactly what I would expect to see in social systems. And so we see doctors waiting to see a woman’s labs go south, or an ectopic pregnancy to rupture, to manage their own risks.

At another level, I can’t accept legislation that impinges on privacy and agency, and healthcare is about as private as it gets. There is no evidence states will be good faith partners in protecting citizen privacy. I am thinking of Ohio bill HB 413 that insisted that ectopic pregnancies be “implanted” in the uterus. So people so clueless of OB-GYN were attempting to legislate the actual care of women in off book procedures that would not have saved fetal life anyway.

Which is where I feel all of this is going. A total lack of privacy and agency legislated at state levels to satisfy idiosyncratic and very local ideals. Guarantees of not only abortion, but gay marriage, decriminalization of gay sex, guarantees to access to contraception, all revoked.