Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2022 July 4

= July 4 =

Woman's "right to her body"
The claim above is used to protest agains abortion laws. Is this the right claim to make? Does the "right to her body" allow a woman, for example, to leave her baby in a car and go out shopping? It's her body... I don't understand the rationale here and would be glad to know where I'm wrong. The more acceptable claim is, for instance, "the embryo isn't yet considered a living creature". Gil_mo (talk) 11:30, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
 * An embryo is INSIDE a woman's body. HiLo48 (talk) 11:57, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Alternatively, one could argue that the woman is OUTSIDE the embryo’s body.
 * Seriously, when discussing abortion we do need to remember that there are TWO bodies involved (mother and child). These two bodies are in a symbiotic relationship… they are physically connected and yet separate… all at the same time!  That is why the debate is so contentious. Blueboar (talk) 12:40, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
 * No. It's contentious ONLY because a small proportion of extremist, misogynous Christin sects in a single country have made it so. HiLo48 (talk) 22:30, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
 * However you might characterize the Catholic Church, "small" is not on the list. --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:22, 5 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Given that most (not all) of the state laws that are currently being put in place (and thus upsetting people) are actually less strict than the laws that Europe has, I agree that they shouldn’t be contentious, but the extremists on BOTH sides make them so. Blueboar (talk) 22:49, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
 * The not-so-strict 2nd-trimester laws were an attempt to create a slippery slope, and maybe get Roe watered down. Now that Roe is gone, they'll mostly be replaced with absolute bans. Even the 'heartbeat' bans, which give you only a week or two from when you miss your period (including scheduling times and mandatory waiting periods), will probably be too lenient for the states that have enacted them. Total bans were always the ultimate goal, with (for many anti-abortionists) contraception and sex ed to follow. — kwami (talk) 02:13, 5 July 2022 (UTC)
 * The opponents of abortion (may) ascribe personhood to the embryo (which may be mixed up with the idea of souls and predestination). The question about what it's morally right to do depends partly on this question about what is factually going on. If a tiny, angry Patrick Henry suddenly appeared inside me, I probably wouldn't have the right to refuse to have the operation which would extract him (alive). Or would I? Anyway, that's the dilemma, unless, as the OP says, we avoid entering into it by instead discussing whether the embryo is a creature with rights. ("Living creature" is not typically the threshold, although Jeremy Bentham, with his awkward nebulous demand to minimise "suffering", would approve.) Card Zero  (talk) 12:48, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
 * You may be interested in the article and relevant section. It's better sourced than any answer you'll get here, though maybe not as recent (which is usually a good thing). SamuelRiv (talk) 13:40, 4 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Chappelle had the best observation on the topic. If she can abort it, then he should be able to abandon it. His money, his choice. GoodDay (talk) 02:51, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
 * That is a not very well considered statement. Your body is you. You have the right to bodily autonomy. Your money is not you. It may be yours, but that is just a societal convention. Notice that you are legally obliged to pay taxes, but you are not legally obliged to work for the the government (or indeed anybody). See the 13th amendment. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 21:51, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

US two-party system compared to British
(Some questions prompted by the one above). Like the US, the UK has a voting system that encourages voters to align with one of two main parties. However, there are some significant differences in how this manifests (both currently and historically).

My first question is about regional veriation (or the lack of it). In the UK, there is a lot of regional variation in what those two parties are. (In most of England, the main parties are Conservatives and Labour, but in parts of England the Liberal Democrats replace one of those, while in Scotland, the SNP is the main party, with either Conservative, Labour, or Lib Dems forming the second party). As far as I am aware, this doesn't happen in the US. In elections to Congress, all states are contested by Republicans and Democrats, and all return mostly one or the other (or a mix of the two). So what stops regional issues dominating in some states enough to allow other parties to become significant?

The second question is about how this has changed over time. In the UK, the big changes in which parties were significant coincided with (and I presume was caused by) changes in voting rights. (Before 1918, only wealthy men could vote, and the main parties were those representing competing varieties of those: Tories/Conservatives for landowners, and Liberals for business. In 1918, restrictions based on wealth/property were removed, and those based on sex partially removed.  Not long after that, Liberal support collapsed, and Labour, representing people who couldn't vote previously, became the main alternative to the Conservatives). Now I know that the US has gone through various changes in voting rights (having previously had restrictions based on wealth and sex, as in the UK, and also on race). And it has also gone through changes in which two parties are competing. But as far as I am aware, the changes in the former don't coincide with the changes in the latter. So why is this? Why did major changes in who could vote not affect who was being voted for? Iapetus (talk) 15:16, 4 July 2022 (UTC)


 * CartogramPresidentialCounty1860Colorbrewer.gif 1860 presidential election was a 4-level layer cake of various levels of southernness (Southern Democrat ( secession! slavery forever!), a make concessions to slaveowners so they don't secede party (the candidate quietly supported when his state seceded after the election), Northern Democrat (split from the rest of the Democrats over slavery, still too slavey supported letting each territory vote on whether to allow slavery or not (popular sovereignty, derided as squatter sovereignty by persons closer to the abolitionist end of the slavery views spectrum as it both resulted in Bleeding Kansas when tried and was tried north of the 1820 Missouri Compromise line due to another decades-long compromise which was to keep the Senate away from the 60% supermajority needed to disrupt the status quo if the president supported or had his veto overruled, for the first real hurdle to soften slave law (i.e. the Fugitive Slave Acts) would've been the Senate as the (then semi-)population-based House had more than 50% free state votes and no >50% rule. Since everyone expected Nebraska to ban slavery those hoping for the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act compromise to work would've hoped for Kansas to be admitted as a slave state), and Abraham Lincoln. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:37, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Sagittarian_Milky_Way -- I already provided a basic description of the parties in the 1860 presidential election, under July 5th above. If you want to elaborate on this, it would be much better to use terminology of the time, such as "Positive good", "Lecompton constitution", "Squatter sovereignty", "Freeport Doctrine", "Congressional slave code", "in the course of ultimate extinction", "restoration of the Missouri Compromise" etc. etc. and then explain the terminology, rather than indulging yourself in hyperbolic personal rhetoric. AnonMoos (talk) 19:48, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
 * My mistake, from over 160 years in the future I forgot they presumably wouldn't have seceded if the Southern Democrats were electorally successful enough that they could've kept slavery expanding fast enough. Maybe just admitting Kansas under the Leecompton Constitution and letting the squatters sovereign would've been enough for awhile. Delaying the civil war probably would've made it harder for the south to win though, as the industrial revolution was strengthening the north faster than it was strengthening the south for decades and this would continue many decades more. With the north's iron and coal and factories and great lake/river/canal systems and railroads and breech-loading and [rifling]] and lever actions and very small rotary machine cannons and exploding artillery shells and ironclad river and ocean ships etc increasingly popular by 1865 and industrial arms and armor getting stronger than that forever, ASAP was the least bad time to secede. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 06:57, 5 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Sagittarian Milky Way -- Your revised version is more appropriate. The coming of the Civil War could have certainly been staved off for a least a few more years if the North had been more subservient to Southern demands, but the fact was that even many Northerners who didn't care all that much about the plight of the slaves were growing very tired of the consistent domination of 2 1/2 branches of the U.S. government (presidency, supreme court, and senate) by Southerners and Southern-sympathizing Northerners during the 1852-1860 period, which was accompanied by pro-Southern revisions to the supposedly "final" Compromise of 1850 (i.e. the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision), and also by prominent Southern spokemen issuing ever more extreme pro-slavery demands.  A large portion of the Northern public in 1860 simply did not feel inclined to make any further major concessions to the South.  I guess "restoration of the Missouri Compromise line" is a little bit of a red herring (sorry), since none of the four major presidential candidates promised that in the 1860 campaign (though a number of people had proposed it in the second half of the 1850s). AnonMoos (talk) 07:12, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
 * My mistake. I guess there was too much history in between for it to be mentioned anymore. Though technically Kansas would've been the first violation of the long obsolete "compromise" so the no expansion beyond the current slave states thing of Lincoln would've covered all land covered by the Missouri Compromise plus some extra (in Indian Territory and west of Texas) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 06:02, 9 July 2022 (UTC)


 * There have been short term regional parties in recent US history... for example, in the 1968, the Democrats had a regional split over the issues of civil rights and the Vietnam War... Southern Democrats formed the American Independent Party (aka the "Dixiecrats") Blueboar (talk) 17:31, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Blueboar -- the term "Dixiecrat" more often refers to the 1948 campaign. In 1968, there was the George Wallace candidacy. AnonMoos (talk) 19:48, 4 July 2022 (UTC)


 * If regional issues dominate politics in one state, Republicans and Democrats from that state take up positions on those issues without ceasing to be Republicans and Demcrats.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 17:33, 4 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Constituencies of the Parliament of the United Kingdom have an average population of 73,181 (2019 figure), while each US congressional district represents 761,179 people, so ten times as many. This likely causes an averaging effect which stops minor parties acquiring officeholders (imagine if the results from every ten UK constituencies were averaged). I'm assuming here that regional voting moods have the same average size everywhere, and that these bubbles of dissent from the mainstream aren't an order of magnitude larger in the US. Third party candidates sometimes make it into government at the state level, as seen for instance in List of Green politicians who have held office in the United States. I notice also that Trump was in the Reform Party (US) when he ran for president in 2000, and there's a general tendency for politicians to flip allegiance between third parties, major parties, and standing as independents. Possibly a glimpse of success incentivizes them to realign with one of the two main parties, or the causality may be the other way round: maybe UK voters are less sensitive to the idea of "a wasted vote" and vote splitting. Card Zero  (talk) 13:52, 5 July 2022 (UTC)
 * In the UK you can sometimes hope your party gets something in return for confidence and supply Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 15:24, 5 July 2022 (UTC)
 * John_Eder says that it was assumed that he would be forced to caucus with one of the two major parties. I don't understand what this means (even after reading Caucus), but the implication is that he wasn't expected to remain a Green party candidate, somehow. Some mechanism working against minor parties here? Card Zero  (talk) 19:57, 5 July 2022 (UTC)
 * In the United States you can't force early elections or an electionless head of government change with a confidence or money vote, if a debt ceiling raise or annual budget can't pass by the deadline it just causes a government shutdown or sovereign default both of which can and have happened for hostage purposes (only a few minutes or hours after 12:00 a.m. for default but up to 35 days in a row for when Trump (semi-unsuccessfully) refused to pass a budget till both houses added a Mexico wall which couldn't reach the 60% and 50% of votes that were needed for it to pass without hostage taking
 * In the United States you can't change the head of government with a confidence or spending vote, if a debt ceiling raise or annual budget can't pass before the deadline it just causes a (disastrous if long enough) sovereign default or government shutdown, this can and has been used for hostage-taking reasons, for up to hours and 35 days in a row respectively (the 35 day shutdown was caused by Trump semi-unsuccessfully refusing to pass the budget till he convinced a small fraction of legislators to let the Mexico wall pass to prevent millions of federal essential employees (i.e. military) and their kids and spouses from going homeless from being forced to work for free till it ends like they even had to wall off the national capital's monument area for 35 days, they wouldn't at least let you walk on the grass like usual (at your own risk from monument police not being allowed to patrol (presumably 911 would still bring city cops, and it's not a high-crime area))), the leverage is not as strong. Also the president has to be from the top 3 parties and in practice 2 is safer cause you can't win outright in the first round with less than 50% of the electoral votes, which are usually winner-take-all. And Americans seem to be allergic to voting for parties that aren't the two most likely to become president though the governor of New Mexico was the (less extreme wing) of the Libertarian Party once. And for a long time 2 out of 100 Senators were independents caucusing with the Democrats. In the other house there are 435 seats and no 60% rule so a one-member minor party is less likely to have leverage. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:02, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
 * One significant difference is that the US is a presidential system - the president is directly elected and has significant power. To be able to contest for the presidency, any major party must be represented in all or most states. Britain is a parliamentary monarchy. The Queen is head of state (and has very little power), while the prime minister is elected by parliament, and can be elected by PMs from multiple parties, forming a coalition government. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 21:57, 6 July 2022 (UTC)