Florida Chief Justice Pushes Fetal Personhood At Argument For Abortion Amendment

[becca656]

These are the ones that get the attention, @steviedee111. A little less of this attention in the media and maybe we can understand what’s going on in Florida.

But that doesn’t sell ads, does it?

[txlawyer]

@becca656

Taking recommendations on alternate paths to Dem rule in FL.

Florida is gerrymandered to the hilt, but the partisan gap is still narrow enough that good candidates can still get elected to statewide office every once in a while. It was just over five years ago that the very good Nikki Fried got elected as Agriculture Commissioner and a closeted, corrupt, Black meth-head damn near got elected governor.

[kelaine]

@shogan1998

It’s the “look, we have to stop being concerned about FL” I objected to. Lots of us are working our butts off to change things, and it hurts to be disregarded like that.

We have several “working our butts off to change things” Floridians here in the TPM community. I salute you all.

Welcome to the comment threads! Check out the Hive and (in particular) the All Things Florida thread.

ETA – I live in rural Pennsylvania. If it weren’t for Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania would have elected White Christian Nationalist Doug Mastriano as our governor and Dr. Oz as our junior senator in 2022.

[steviedee111]

@becca656

These are the ones that get the attention, @steviedee111. A little less of this attention in the media and maybe we can understand what’s going on in Florida.

Had a friend moved to The Villages. He left after a couple years. Told me the whole place is a hotbed of right wing insanity, just as I expected. College educated guy, years in advertising and banking. Told me until someone actually spent time living there they’d have no way of knowing just how over the top nuts the place is.

[becca656]

They need a whole lot more than one or two, every once in a while.

They need to throw the entire bunch out and start over with a clean slate.

Florida Legislature - Wikipedia

And that includes the executive branch as well.

[irasdad]

@steviedee111

[szz]

What weird phrasing - when this constitution was written were they aware of un-natural persons and AI?

[txlawyer]

The Florida legislature is a lost cause for now. Winning the governor’s mansion in 2030 would help un-gerrymander it, but taking it back is not going to happen otherwise. And the slippage of the Cuban and Venezuelan exile communities into dipshit MAGA-ism is deeply concerning.

[progress]

I was born and raised in deep red Florida. My aging mom still lives in my hometown, her home for over six decades. As conservative as the area was in my youth (and it was), the current situation pales in comparison to the never-ending parade of damaging fringe theories and performative cruelty measures passing as “governance” today.

I moved away years ago and will never return. Yet I worry about mother, my friends, other family members and even strangers such as yourself. But what precisely can I or anyone do to help when Florida residents persist in sending the current stock or the next wave of haters to Tallahassee? That’s a serious question – how can an outsider help?

[john_adams]

The photo looks like the Tallahassee branch of that infamous law firm, Dowhee, Cheetum and Howe.

[sparrowhawk]

@szz

What weird phrasing - when this constitution was written were they aware of un-natural persons and AI?

I was curious too and “natural person” is a legal term of art referring to a human being, as opposed to a “legal person” which can refer to a corporation or non-profit. A human being would be both a “natural” and “legal” person, while a company can only be a “legal” one.

[isakindamagic]

I have driven extensively in America, in concentrated manner, i.e., off-interstate, and worked in 350 small towns across 19 states.

These are places where between church, the VA, the school, and the Lodge everyone shares the same opinion or is shunned. The deregulation around media monopolies has rendered these towns 100% infected with whatever Sinclair Media is coordinating with the GOP and whatever conspiracy theories the guy in town with the best haircut believes. He’s the mayor, usually.

There is a schism in the country that has been created and charged to the point that places that haven’t had a break since The Grapes of Wrath are now just bristling with guns and a politically directed rage. All that is worth harvesting now is their votes, and all they have to offer is their anger.

Trump is their Messiah, and no matter what happens, there will be places seething with a more focused rage for this whole endeavor for it.

There are plenty of bars in plenty of towns where just coming from a city, or seeming too urbane will get you beaten bloody. That was in the days before they got to place their boiling rage at your feet for being a pedophile because you drive a Prius.

Never mind the fact that the barroom bigot of a generation ago is now the leading haircut in tens of thousands of dying towns. Nope.

[txlawyer]

Your dystopia does not match my reality, and I live in Texas. It’s fine. Nobody gives a shit about your Prius.

[noonm]

Be forewarned, the end-goal of the anti-abortionists is not just getting fetal personhood recognized in states they control, but across the country. A quick primer:

A Brief Guide to Fetal Personhood, the Next Frontier In Anti-Choice Politics

Currently, constitutional rights attach to people who are actually born. Anti-choice activists think those rights should attach to embryos and fetuses, too. The Mississippi abortion restriction at issue in Dobbs , for example, uses the phrase “unborn human being”—a purposeful shift from the language of cases like Roe v. Wade , which discussed “fetal life.”

If you think the movement is limited to fetuses that have attained the possibility of viability outside the womb—around 23 to 25 weeks—you are extremely wrong. Fetal personhood is the idea that every fertilized egg is entitled to full protections of the law, and is a constitutionally-protected entity separate from the pregnant person.

At the federal level, anti-choice activists are already pushing for a national abortion ban in the event that Roe falls. Judicial adoption or legislative codification of fetal personhood would be different and even more consequential, because it would not only restrict (if not outright bar) pregnant people even in blue states from getting an abortion, but would also require them to change their behavior to protect the full-fledged person housed within them. Cranks like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul have been stumping for this idea for a long time; in the House, this year’s version of the “Life at Conception Act” has more than 150 co-sponsors.

The basic problem with fetal personhood is that it is fundamentally at odds with how pregnancy works: People don’t magically know they’re pregnant the second it happens, and thus cannot alter their lives accordingly. Most people don’t realize they’re pregnant between the fifth or sixth week, which is, incidentally, the cutoff for legal abortion in Texas right now. Fetal personhood, in other words, grants rights to someone who no one knows exists yet . And the only way for courts to meaningfully protect these purported rights, of course, is to assert total control over the bodies of people who could get pregnant at all times.

And the mechanism of their madness will be a SCOTUS ruling that fetuses have 14th amendment rights and protections:

What’s the conservative case for fetal personhood?

Basically, that the courts’ interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment has been wrong and crabbed for a long time. In an amicus brief in Dobbs , conservative law professors Mary Ann Glendon and O. Carter Snead complain that Roe extended Fourteenth Amendment protections to pregnant people but not to “unborn human beings,” thus placing them “beyond the bounds and protection of our legal system.” (Snead, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, is the same person who wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post promising that liberals had “nothing to fear” from the Supreme Court nomination of his friend of 15 years, Amy Coney Barrett.)

Another pair of conservative professors, John M. Finnis and Robert P. George, argue that if the Court could declare corporations to be persons back in 1886, there is no reason they couldn’t extend the same courtesy to “unborn human beings” today. Sure, they note, fetuses can’t vote or become president, but that’s also true for corporations which the Court has “unflinchingly included” within the scope of rights that are normally reserved for actual people. “The originalist case for including the unborn is much stronger than for corporations,” they conclude, which is as damning an indictment of the Supreme Court’s corporations law jurisprudence as it is of originalism.

[jonney_5]

Remember when everyone said it was a good idea to let a state court be the arbiter of 14/3.

Red states are chock full of elected POS’s like this… best ti leave that door closed

[isakindamagic]

Your knowledge of Texas vs. my knowledge of 19 states and 350 towns professionally, and another 26 states by train, bus, car, and foot.

Texas sure is big.

And empty.

ETA: Possible, report possible, to cross the country by road without being in Texas. Texans though!

Also: Times Square license given to beat migrants nationwide brought to you live, today.

[drriddle]

@steviedee111

Soon enough some state will decree sperm is half a person and make masturbation illegal.

No, that will never happen, as it would put limits on a man’s sexuality and the right wingers believe that men have a God given right to do whatever they want with their pee-pee, whether that’s masturbating or sticking it into women who don’t want it.

I’m not sure the level of sarcasm in that statement, but it’s not nearly as sarcastic as it should be due to the awfulness of the right wingers.

[randyabraham]

And the Legislature is hardly representative of the people. I was once in a SE Florida district that included a waterfront sliver stretching from Miami Beach to Jupiter Beach.

[tacoma]

@steviedee111

Anyone spending an afternoon with them would leave thinking a pregnant woman has no business consuming alcohol.

its no one’s business what a pregnant woman does, how does anyone know what harm alcohol does to sperm? maybe whatever damage is done happens before the sperm leaves the man. stop holding women responsible for every thing that goes wrong!!!

[tacoma]

@progress

But what precisely can I or anyone do to help when Florida residents persist in sending the current stock or the next wave of haters to Tallahassee? That’s a serious question – how can an outsider help?

i still live here, i’ll be damned if i let a bunch of religious freaks drive me out, Florida needs all the help it can get… altho’ most people here just shrug and roll their eyes at the current bunch of morons