Open Thread Should Abortion be Allowed in the US?

That decision should be entirely up to the individual pregnant woman or girl.  No one else should be able to restrict her self-determination in such a primally personal matter.

It’s complicated.  Professor Peabody can tell you that. 

First there was the law of clans which was more survivalist than moralist and then along came tribal laws from the shaman healer who evolved into the shaman priest with the law itself then coming down from god serving as a quasi-moral authority.  Eventually God somewhat dropped the quasi from the moral as the law of kings began to displace gods as the higher power.  All this evolved upon the backdrop of prehistorical survival being redefined from sufficient genetic diversity for breeding pairs to have enough surviving offspring to mate without recessive genes severely effecting species mortality to being defined by the demand for larger armies to invade and displace competing super-clans (e.g., Europeans displacing indigenous tribes in the Americas).  This latter definition of survival as dominance has continued throughout recorded history, sometimes with separation of church and state but most of the time without or with minimal separation.  No amount of rationalism can entirely replace tradition without reasonable negotiation between opposing points of view that adapts rather than replaces tradition.  The traditional aspects of survival allowed for neither women’s reproductive health choices nor excess human population gradually making our planet uninhabitable for a majority of species.  However, from the dawn of human prehistory the separation between moral authority and civic authority has been either thin or nonexistent and all authority over the lives of human beings has rested in a very few hands assisted by a great deal of hand waving and smoke and mirrors working behind the curtain.  

Aside from sociopaths, individual human beings all consider their own biases morally and factually based.  Sociopaths only account for between 3% and 10% of antisocial behavioral individuals.  The remainder of antisocial behavior is the result of fear, isolation, and stupidity.  We really need to learn to talk to each other, but people are not very good at talking openly and honestly.  Humanity has outsourced all the important decisions in life to an elite class that retains their special station by dividing the subordinate classes along natural demographic divisions and providing them with rationalizations supporting their own higher moral positions and demonizing all others with opposing points of view.  Historically, gods have always been purveyors of their own flawless self-righteousness, but Jesus of Nazareth, Siddhartha Gautama, and the Taoists all viewed self-righteousness as the major pitfall in mankind’s search for a higher understanding.  Originally, those ideas were not diametrically opposed because man had not yet begun to consider himself as God.