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Comment by erellsworth | Hacker News Reader

No, best would be to leave it up to the individual.

We don't do that with other state laws like murder and theft. And different states have different ideas on what those laws should look like too.

EDIT: I'm not sure what you mean by that. Are you upset about SCOTUS citing common law tradition? Most of our law works that way, you have to build on something. Even "reason" needs axioms and you have to find a way to pick those.

EDIT2: There are a surprising number of people who want to decriminalize theft and even murder in some situations (look up "mutual combat" in Chicago.)

It seems utterly ridiculous that you would rather go on precedent than case by case rational decision making.

Abortion is not murder or theft. An appropriate comparison would be an appendectomy. If states started banning appendectomies, I would hope the fed would codify it as law.

This is the very core of the disagreement. Pro-life people do not agree that it’s comparable to an appendectomy.

And that is where nearly 1/2 of America disagrees. Abortion is murder.

27% of america agrees -- https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/06/americas-abo...

Abortion not being murder is clearly an opinion a great deal of people disagree on. Kind of the crux of the issue.

That framing begs the question. Virtually everyone agrees murder and theft should be crimes. There is vast philosophical disagreement on whether abortion should be a crime. You can believe it is murder, but the majority of Americans disagree. Ultimately, it should be up to the pregnant person to weigh the morality of that decision, not the government.

> Virtually everyone agrees [...] theft should be crimes

Wasn't there just a thread here a few days ago that had a bunch of people arguing that the decriminalization of shoplifting in San Francisco is a good thing?

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