Politics: Anti-Abortion Laws v. Stand Your Ground Laws

[teddywolf]

Might be triggery for some.
I had a thought recently about those Stand Your Ground laws going around in right-wing states. For example, Florida's is here (h/t to Canada's online legal magazine, Slaw). Many of those right-wing states also have increasingly difficult anti-abortion laws on the books.

My thought was, would the text of a Stand Your Ground law actually allow somebody to perform an abortion in an anti-abortion state? This is a tricky one, but a case could be made that the answer is Yes.

Discuss?

Comments

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

Er, content to follow? Perhaps.list in the Great Triskaidekaphobic LJ Freeze of this afternoon?

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

Okay, so it is there if I look in full-page view, but not in mobile view. Humph.

[ron_newman]

it's an lj-spoiler rather than an lj-cut, so it expands in place.

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

In the (beta) m.livejournal view, it is not there at all -- neither the spoiler cut format nor the text it hides -- on either the friends page or the single-post view.

Wonder what they did so differently from the lj-cut format? (Other than not mutilating it with pseudo scissors, that is.)

[ron_newman]

I didn't know m.livejournal.com even existed, but you should submit a bug report, pointing them at this post as an example.

(sorry to hijack your comment thread, teddywolf)

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

Er, yes, didn't mean to stray this far off topic. Apologies.

(Also ... done: www.livejournal.com/support (http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=1483757))

[kahuna-burger.livejournal.com]

I'd say the right to bodily autonomy (which I base my prochoice stand on, thus skipping the issue of fetal personhood entirely) is a more fundemental issue of self defense than "stand your ground" or the castle doctrine. Both of the latter allow self defense to be claimed without any responsibility to retreat from a threatening situation, but pregnancy by taking place in your own body cannot be retreated from to begin with.

But I see your point that if a person isn't obligated to even consider the least damaging way to stop someone they feel threatened by, draconian restrictions on exactly how threatened a woman has to be by a pregnancy before she ends it don't seem consistant. I've heard of some "life of the mother" exceptions that require a doctor estimate a greater than 50% chance of the woman dying before the exception can be made. Can you even imagine a judge saying "only 25%* of victims of armed robbery are shot if they hand over the cash without question and only 30% of those are fatal, so there was no strong enough threat to justify killing someone."

*totally made up statistic, natch.

Of course then we get the "the innocent embryo/fetus never chose to threaten anyone!" objection. This is where the "stand your ground" laws become even more relevant, as proponents of them reject actual intent or objective threat from the 'attacker' as a criterion and focus exclusively on the 'defender's perception of danger.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Well, bodily autonomy *is* the basis of abortion rights. That's why, when some pathetic moron argued for the right to post-birth abortion, they were, in fact, both pathetic, and a moron - doubly so, since one can't "abort" a pregnancy that has already come to a natural end (childbirth).

Bodily autonomy is what it's *all* about. You get a right to decide about your body. The courts decided that, at a certain point, fetal personhood does play a role, and that the role occurs at viability (which was presumed to be at the third trimester). Then, it was decided that the state had an interest in protecting the fetus, but not one that over-rode the health concerns of the pregnant woman. If the pregnancy endangered her health, she got to make the decision, along with her doctor - not the legislature. Which makes sense - why should the legislature, in a different time and place, with insufficient information, get to make such a decision?

In fact, if there was justice and sound, full reasoning on both sides, anyone who supported Stand Your Ground laws would feel compelled to support a health exception for abortion at any stage of pregnancy. Just as a person who has the *right* to defend themselves with lethal force can choose not to do so, so too can a pregnant woman choose to take on the additional risk to herself by delaying or foregoing an abortion.

[azaz-al.livejournal.com]

It should, except many conservative politicians are so completely moronic that they actually believe (as in they have gone on record saying in several cases) there is no instance in which pregnancy endangers a woman's life. I've seen lots of speeches by these guys where they claim it's bs that there even needs to be a health exemption to anti-abortion laws, since there isn't an health problem that ending a pregnancy will solve. Having been through toxemia personally with my son I cannot describe the violent urges this line of political bs gives me. So in theory your idea is right - women should be able to have an abortion under a "stand your ground" law by feeling, quite rightfully so,afraid for their lives - but I'd not expect those who are too ignorant to have heard of even the most common dangerous pregnancy complications to understand this.

If I was a woman

[andreas_schaefer]

and actually even as a man*, I feel threatened by such politicians.

Who can tell what lifetreatening for ME ideas they come up with next. ( "only 1 in 5 soldiers die in battele, you are drafted " ? )

Note: legally for a court to handle a question like intent of the percieved attacker is very difficult. How are you going to prove or un-prove what was only in the head of a person ? What a court or a jury CAN decide is if the response to an action is reasonably to feel threatened and if the response ACTION is proportionate to the percieved danger. ( using a rocker launcher to stop other cars from tailgating [ this is a real threat ] will usually be considered out of proportion ])
I am however not a lawyer either in Germany or the US. Some stuff may have rubbed of in living with one for 15 years ('79 - '94).