When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it claimed to be removing the judiciary from the abortion debate. In reality, it simply gave the courts a macabre new task: deciding how far states can push a patient toward death before allowing her to undergo an emergency abortion.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit offered its own answer, declaring that Texas may prohibit hospitals from providing “stabilizing treatment” to pregnant patients by performing an abortion—withholding the procedure until their condition deteriorates to the point of grievous injury or near-certain death.
The ruling proves what we already know: Roe’s demise has transformed the judiciary into a kind of death panel that holds the power to elevate the potential life of a fetus over the actual life of a patient.
Yes, because “death panels” is just emotional language, not a well-defined thing. So polemicists on the left and right use it to try and make people angry about something they might not otherwise be angry about.
The fact that polemicists on the right labelled something as X in order to criticise it, but then later people on the right generally support something that polemicists on the left also labelled as X, is not indicative of anything at all, because there is no reason to think that the common labelling represents any actual similarity between the two things, or even represents any underlying truth whatsoever.
This is even more the case because the people who push these lines often deliberately (misguidedly, in my opinion) pick labels used by the other side for something they dislike, thinking it will aid the cause. This means there’s a motivation to stretch labels inappropriately.
That’s a lot of words for “both side bad”
I at least agree that a term like “death panels” is a loaded label. I can still agree that judicially restricting life-saving treatments is a terrible practice, without shorthanding it to a “death panel”.
EDIT: Fixed double negative
No, it’s not “both side bad” (and the implication there is that any time when someone says “both sides do this badly” is unhelpful, which I disagree with).
It’s “both sides are doing something similar here but that thing isn’t part of the reasoning or decision making of each side, and you’re treating it like it is.”
My original statement was an observation of the irony here, not a social commentary on what a “death panel” actually is. Whether the panels of death came about intentionally or not has nothing to do with the fact that they are creating what they were crying about years ago.
Using the term this way is to point out the hypocrisy. Republicans are against “death panels” in Obamacare. These were nothing but a means to decide how certain end of life care should be done, and exist in every medical system going back to when we were striking flint to make fire. Republicans have just handed women actually bad death panels in the form of judiciary and legislative branches that can hold back medical care until it’s too late.
The difference, of course, is that in this case there is an actual panel and death is actually on the table.
That’s a difference but there are many more, which is why them getting the same label is unimportant.