Why was this even posted here?!

And he's a member of the Australian parliament with views that represent a significant minority of racist Australians. Views that are not particularly dissimilar to the mainstream racist majority who support the Liberals and Labor.

*marxism

Richard Wolff: a "Marxist" whose solution to capitalism is capitalism.

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Kids?

I don't know, I suspect that when the US goes overtly fascist - perhaps sooner than anyone thought (though it has flirted with fascism for a some time) - I suspect that the US army will just fall into line.

Agreed.

Nevertheless, suggesting that a foetus isn't a living entity is absurd.

I don't represent the entire left, but as a member of the left I think you're misrepresenting our (at least my) concerns. It's not that we don't care about the unborn, it is that this is a complex situation that involves more than one person in an unusual circumstance.

On the one hand, the mother (and others involved) who for whatever reason don't want to bring a child into the world and look after it (yes I know about adoption and yes, it is a very good solution for some women/situations). On the other hand, the foetus. It may be little more than a collection of cells. It might have a heartbeat. It might be thinking/dreaming/hearing/feeling. You could even consider it to be a person at certain stages of development (or even from the very first cell division, if you want). It could even be considered killing a person to kill the foetus. I can accept all of that and yet I can accept the need for abortion. Just like we accept killing and/or not helping (so that they die) poor people, old people, disabled people, sick people, refugees, soldiers from other countries, people on deathrow, animals, etc. We accept justified killing in many circumstances. Making abortion legal simple means that in this circumstance, we accept that the killing is justified.

If you kill a pregnant woman, you may not be charged with murder. You will only be charged if the state does not consider the killing to be justified. I think that is where you're struggling with this issue. In the US, on a basic level, the state and populace consider the killing of an unborn child to be justified killing. You need to make an argument for why it isn't. (I don't really need to make an argument for why it is justified because I'm with the status quo on this one.)

A foetus is a living entity. You'll be going down a fairly preposterous set of arguments that go against all of our understanding of life if you try to maintain that it isn't a living entity. It is in many ways a parasite that has latched onto the mother's body and is trying to suck nutrients from it long enough to be able to be born. The foetus releases hormones to fight against the mother's immune system to prevent the mother's body from rejecting this invasion by such a vastly different genetic entity. At least, that's one way to look at it. There are many others that are correct. None of those suggest that the foetus isn't a living entity.

It is somewhat true that the foetus is part of the mother's body. Her body certainly envelopes the foetus' and the foetus couldn't live without it.

To say that it's her choice whether to terminate is clearly not true. The state has permitted women to make that decision in some places around the world, in some periods of time. It certainly isn't an inalienable right as you seem to be suggesting. It's a fight that women have had and continue to have in order to be able to express control over the bodies and lives. A simple expression of what you think should be the law isn't an argument for why the law should be that way.

It is only murder if the state considers the killing to be unlawful. Someone who kills and is prosecuted (and found guilty) for murder is someone who has committed murder. If a woman kills her unborn child, it is only murder if the state has decided that killing unborn children is murder. If abortion is legal, it is not murder to kill the unborn child.

To say that the state is putting roadblocks in place to prevent women from committing murder is a rather absurd misunderstanding of what the existing US laws actually are.

dupe

I find it interested that the right-wing and left-wing in the US love to describe the US as socialist. Though they have different motivations for doing so, they're equally incorrect.

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