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Comment by 0xfeba | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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> 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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