Comment by bjt2n3904 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bjt2n3904 | Hacker News Reader

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As an addendum. Many people (quite frankly) worship "Science" like it is a benevolent deity. You just have to "listen" to it, and good results will come out, bettering society.

But terrible things happen when you try to apply science to a field that it should not apply to. Science can tell you how to do something effectively. It will not tell you whether or not it is good or beneficial to do a certain thing.

There was a news article recently published, that claimed that Iceland had eradicated Down's Syndrome. The mother runs through a battery of tests to determine if her baby has a genetic abnormality -- and if so, can choose an abortion. Unequivocally, this is genocide! Genocide!

Contrary to the "IFL Science" types who wake up singing "There's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow", Huxley has an appreciation for what science is truly capable of.

> We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.

What you've done in this subthread breaks the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to them, no matter how right you are or feel you are about a topic? Note these:

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

There's always a bit of wiggle room but the line from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198407 (a fine HN comment) to "abortion is genocide" definitely intersects the outer boundary of the rules.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198407.

With all due respect, I think you have read something I did not intend in this comment. Abortion is not necessarily genocide, but Iceland's specific application of it to those with Down's Syndrome is the textbook definition of eugenics.

I can clearly see how an unqualified "abortion is genocide" would be an unrelated controversy, but within the context, my point was to illustrate that a naive understanding of science as something that consumes data and produces a better society is also scientific illiteracy.

I was making more superficial points: (1) changing the subject to abortion already breaks the site guideline against generic flamewar tangents, and (2) a bomb-throwing word like 'genocide' is a flame multiplier that breaks the guidelines even further. Nothing good can come of this in an internet thread.

> The mother runs through a battery of tests to determine if her baby has a genetic abnormality -- and if so, can choose an abortion.

Providing expectant parents with better information and more choice? Sign me up.

> Unequivocally, this is genocide! Genocide!

If it's unequivocal, why do opposing opinions exist?

From "gene" (as in DNA, genetic screening) and "-cide" (killing), litterally "killing a gene", in the most literal sense of the word.

> There was a news article recently published, that claimed that Iceland had eradicated Down's Syndrome. The mother runs through a battery of tests to determine if her baby has a genetic abnormality -- and if so, can choose an abortion. Unequivocally, this is genocide! Genocide!

I'm really interested in how you can categorize abortion of unwanted babies as genocide. I mean, I get it, they prevented DS babies from being born, ergo "eliminated a group of people", for generous definitions of people.

Would you say the same about preventing all babies from being born with fetal alcohol syndrome by having the mothers abort? What about having the mothers not drink when pregnant?

> I'm really interested in how you can categorize abortion of unwanted babies as genocide.

Sanger, 1924: "How are we to breed a race of human thoroughbreds unless we follow the same plan? We must make this country into a garden of children instead of a disorderly back lot overrun with human weeds."

Sanger, 1939: "The minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."

Sounds like eugenics and genocide to me.

> Would you say the same about preventing all babies from being born with fetal alcohol syndrome by having the mothers abort?

Yes.

Sanger was objectively a terrible person. That doesn't mean that abortion is a automatically immoral.

So you can equate terminating a pregnancy with that of murdering adults and children but unfortunately in reality it's a grey area. The older the fetus gets, the less grey it gets but there's no solid line to make it easy as much as conservatives would like to believe. Especially in cases of rape, or high-risk pregnancies.

It's a terrible decision to have to make, so I'm all for reducing the number of abortions. But you can't do that by outlawing abortion. And the side that wants to do that, outlaw abortion, also wants to pretend teenagers can "just not have sex" and that there's no need to teach them about safe sex, contraceptives, etc.

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