It's the courts, Stupid!

Yesterday a bunch of Bernie Bros got Souter trending on Twitter, claiming that if Joe Biden is elected we will get a conservative Supreme court Justice.

Let's get some detail on that one:

Nominee	Year/President	Vote	Biden's vote
John Paul Stevens	1975, Ford	98-0	Yea
Sandra Day O'Connor	1981, Reagan	99-0	Yea
William Rehnquist	1986, Reagan	65-33	Nay
Antonin Scalia	1986, Reagan	98-0	Yea
Anthony Kennedy	1988, Reagan	97-0	Yea
David Souter	1990, George H.W. Bush	90-9	Yea
Clarence Thomas	1991, George H. W. Bush	52-48	Nay
Ruth Bader Ginsburg	1993, Bill Clinton	96-3	Yea
Stephen Breyer	1994, Bill Clinton	87-9	Yea
John Roberts	2005, George W. Bush	78-22	Nay
Samuel Alito	2006, George W. Bush	58-42	Nay

Here is the thing, on every controversial Republican pick, Biden voted no. He voted with the majority of the Democratic party the majority of the time, and if he wins the election he will probably nominate court justices like RBG, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayer, and Elena Kagan.

There are also a lot of lower courts which Trump has had the ability to pack over the last 3 years, given how McConnell refused to give Obama his appointees which was I believe was technically unconstitutional. If Trump wins another term, he will probably replace either RBG or Stephen Breyer by 2025. If that happens, here are the court decisions which are likely to be overturned:

1. Obergefell v. Hodges
2. Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey
3. Massachusetts v. EPA
4. Texas v. Johnson
5. Grutter v. bollinger

and more.

This is what you are voting on.

Reasons to be Pro-Choice

No intro, let's just get on with it.

1. It is fundamentally wrong to force a woman to give birth to a baby she doesn't want to. Enough?
2. If you are arguing you are killing a person, you need to go back to biology, because the fetus is not conscious separate from the mother until the third trimester.
3. No form of birth control is 100% effective. Sometimes people don't realize their pregnant until at least 6 weeks in.
4. Abortion is safer than giving birth and saves lives.
5. The vast majority of abortions are done in the first trimester, when the fetus hasn't even developed a brain. We regularly declare people who have lost brain function as "legally dead." Why is a fetus different? You are causing no pain to the fetus because it literally cannot feel when the vast majority of abortions are done.
6. Forcing someone to give birth can maker her life significantly worse.
7. Rape is ridiculously hard to prove. Any law restricting abortion except in the case of rape will have an unacceptably high false negative rate.
8. Laws against abortion are almost never coupled with increased punishment for rapists.
9. The same politicians who fight abortion access tend to be the same ones who fight against access to sexual education, health care, and education. The easiest way to reduce abortions is to increase access to all three, which anti-abortion laws never come with.
10. Laws against abortion are almost never limited to just the first trimester. There is absolutely no biological reason to have a legal restriction on abortions to only the first trimester ever in any circumstance. They argue abortion is about killing babies, but third trimester abortions accounts for a very small number of abortions, usually because of health reasons.
11. Why should a society force a baby to be born but doesn't guarantee health care to that baby once it is alive?

Donate to Planned Parenthood today.

How to fix a problem

Colorado has successfully reduced teenage pregnancies by 40% in the last over the last 6 years. This is one issue very few people would disagree that teenage pregnancies are a problem (given the cost of young women having to raise a kids when they would otherwise be in school and other issues) but the solutions continues to be debated. The way Colorado did it was very simple, make it so people don't get pregnant by offering free IUDs. This is currently being debated in their legislature where the Republican majority is trying to end the program. The startling part of this is that we while teenage pregnancies are down, abortions are down too because they are not getting pregnant in the first place. New York Times

This has a massive lesson for all policies, and especially for activists, which the fairly simple notion that if there is a problem you are trying to correct you should aim at the root of the problem, just like in the garden where you need to pull the roots in order to get the plant. If you want to reduce abortions, you should make it so women don't get pregnant in the first place by providing IUDs. It is far cheaper for society to provide an IUD for a young woman than the increase in welfare payments that could occur if the woman gets pregnant. Here are a few more examples of this type of thinking:

1. If you are concerned about income inequality, the Earned Income Tax Credit is successful at reducing poverty because it alleviates low incomes with more income. Effective tax credits make it so you have an incentive to earn an extra dollar.
2. If you want to fix global warming, you need to reduce carbon emissions. If you want to reduce carbon emissions (or really reduce any bad), you want to tax it to make it more expensive.
3. When trying to help third-world countries develop while aid can be effective the root cause of the poverty needs to be the goal of advocacy efforts. Working to fight corruption in governments, build high-quality nationwide systems, and build infrastructure which prevent their economies from developing alongside immediate aid will help move these countries to a point where poverty can finally end.

Any time an advocate comes to me with an issue telling me what they want to do, if I agree with their overall goals, I always ask the question of how they are going to go about fixing the issue. In order to make sure the remedy is actually going to solve the problem you need to understand how the problem came about in the first place, and you need to understand the processes behind the issue so that you can effectively remedy the problem. Not doing so frequently leads to remedies which are along the lines of "your forehead is hot because you have a fever, so in order to stop the fever we only need to cool your forehead and the fever will go away." While cooling the forehead is a first step it will not by itself end the fever and in order to supplement our natural response mechanisms you need a more direct remedy to fight the virus. The same principle applies in fixing social problems where in order to really fix the problem we need to understand it and attack it at the root, because if we don't fix the root of the problem we will be caught up in a very expensive never ending battle.

This is where solutions like what Colorado did to end teenage pregnancy is really effective because they fought the issue at the root which was far more effective than other methods, like abstinence-only sex education. In order to be effective advocates we need more policies like this.