Google says US employees can relocate to states with abortion rights
theverge.com
theverge.com
Even Disney is going to transport workers to abortion-legal states as needed as "health benefit".
It's certainly a perk and good on Google for this one, but we're headed to a dark place if your best shot at human rights is to retain employment by a big tech company.
The jaded side of me wonders if some amount of companies figured it'd be cheaper to pay for an abortion than maternity leave and health insurance.
Duo you mean that women who undergo abortion wild not do that if they had access to healthcare and maternity leave?
We have access to both and still have abortions. About 220k per year, which is about 30% of all pregnancies.
Either we have a dumb population that did not know what contraception is (we have sex ed all the time), or there are deeper reasons for this action which is never fun for a woman.
US also has laws requiring up to 3 months of leave for having children.
So, if you have a child, the company must accept or pay for your leave, depending on policy, and their health insurance costs for you go up.
To anyone unfamiliar with our health care system for typical employees:
Once a year, most companies have a "benefits training" session that explains this year's crazy health care situation. They're boring and I only go to the first one when I join a company.
But it's 2022 and we have youtube, so I found Ohio State's training in public: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjAWj0f6DAc
Anyone employed with benefits needs to have at least a vague understanding of everything in there or they're at financial risk.
So when you hear about contractors fighting to become employees so they have access to benefits, they're fighting for the opportunity to make these benefits elections.
I know plenty of people who design systems for a living that find getting their elections right to be confusing.
You'll notice that a big part of our health care cost mitigation is projecting expenses. It's like a prediction market where you can only lose less, but if you get it wrong you can lose a lot.
Fun!
- you have mandatory health insurance which is a percentage of your income
- you have an extra insurance (called mutuelle) which you may not have if you are not salaried (but that you get anyway), or it may be compulsory if you are salaried.
Doctors can be in one of the two groups: 1 or 2. 1 means that your costs are fixed and regulated by law. This is for instance 25€ for a general/family doctor visit. n% of this is reimbursed by the compulsory insurance, and the other one reimburses the rest. n depends on the medical act - for instance for the visit to the MD n=70.
The group 2 fixes their prices as they wish. This is usually for specialists (but not always, there are plenty of specialists that are in the group 1)
The extra insurance covers up to M times the regular cost. M depends on the act and on the insurance.
Generally speaking - the more serious the act, the more you are reimbursed. A heart operation will be free no matter what, but something simple may cost a lot (more that the extra coverage). It is very rare, though, to go over that extra coverage.
Dental is not covered very well - it is OK for small things but implants fo instance are notoriously expensibve (you may pay, say, 1000€ out of 6000€). So is optical (you can always get glasses for free but they will not be the best ones).
Specifically, Ford realizing it was cheaper to pay for crash lawsuits than making everyone's car safer in the days of rear end gas tanks.
You also have to keep in mind that the cost of onboarding a new developer is orders of magnitude more expensive than allowing a developer to relocate out of state or pay for a temporary trip there.
Im glad I have dual citizenship because It does feel like the next 4 years is going to be a very sharp downturn (socially) in the US.
People keep focusing on what this all means to minorities, but if you're just an old white male and sick they'll let you die, too.
Cue the old Niemoller poem.
The maddening thing about this is these issues are all correctable by law, but most people (rightly, I think) don't believe the body with an 18% approval rating will successfully pass those laws.
The cynical view is it might be better for them to keep up the supply of low skilled labor...
But we're already here. We are in that dark place now. It's reality that if you work for big tech you get a perk this perk, and if not, you don't.
Edit: point being that we aren't heading to a bad place. Maybe we are heading to a worse place, but this has put a ton of people in a very bad place already.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/17/apple-is-monitori...
If they're truly against these policies, gutting those states of thousands of high earning jobs and refusing to build any new offices is the most effective way to do it.
The Russian sanctions actually surprised me in that a lot of corporations actually pulled out and fast. I'll be even more surprised if they stay out for years to come.
> The Russian sanctions actually surprised me in that a lot of corporations actually pulled out and fast.
Companies either pulled out because they were legally obligated (That's what sanctions are) or they wanted to avoid reputational damage to their brands. Again, rational self interest.
Corporations do not and I'd argue should not take political positions in the way people do.
Your statement really could not be further from the truth.
I don't think the effects of one's actions, such as those of Disney's, would negate whether the company intended to do something to help their own company.
What I meant was taking sides on divisive hot button issues is fraught with peril. The probability of blowback is high.
Even if a large proportion of employees held a particular political position, I'd imagine only a small number of activist employees would be disgruntled by the company choosing to stay out of it.
Oh, I strongly agree that it could be riskier and most companies would probably prefer to appear apolitical, especially with those charged topics. I was a part of a global organization that seemed to take much pride in saying it was apolitical, but had many many many views on how society should be organized, so I think yes, the corporate culture can strongly discourage the appearance of being involved in politics or religion or sex or some taboo topics and to also discourage not just appearance but action as well.
With that being said, abortion should be legal at the federal level. By your logic, this isn't a political statement.
Literally nobody will benefit from a ban on abortions. That doesn't stop people from taking such a position.
It seems what you're really trying to say is that corporations should only act in rational self interest. As has been pointed out, there are circumstances in which a corporation can be acting in rational self interest by supporting abortion, or by taking other politically-charged positions.
The whole rational-vs.-political dichotomy you're trying to put forth is a false one; being political is not synonymous with being irrational or whatever you're suggesting.
The political class benefits from constituencies terrorized by leaders who criminalize health care
AFAIK, there were no sanctions regarding multinational corporations. McDonalds etc. were not legally obligated to pull out.
Renault has signed a deal where they sell the AvtoVAZ factory to Russian state but can buy back in the next 6 years and are in the meantime giving AvtoVAZ designs of new Renault models and assistance with getting parts for clones from more Russian-friendly countries.
McDonalds definitely feels like they're doing something similar but in a more covert way. Ate there in Moscow yesterday. They have a new logo, Big Mac is missing from menu (trademark negotiations probably?), but other than that I assure you they're re-open.
French retailer Auchan did not move out of Russia and I have some friends who stopped shopping there and are quite vocal about how noone should shop there.
Don't anthropomorphize corporations.
Corporations have no self-interest or do not think. Corporations are human artifacts composed of human beings that have specific rules applied to them in the great game in our societies, and tend to behave accordingly. This behavior have patterns that we as humans recognize unsurprisingly as human, because they are composed by humans. A corporation is a as rational as a group of humans can be.
Corporations do not always "act" in their self interest, and we can (and in my opinion should) expect moral obligations from them as we do with humans.
How about with taxes paid there?
German chancelor Olaf Scholz halted $10b Nord Stream 2 project and plans to stop fossils import from Russia to cut cash flow to Putin's regime. Other repercussions' goal is similar: to stop indirectly funding Putin's invasion.
Everyone paying Russia could just "stay put" but this wouldn't be inaction.
How about taxes paid in countries with more civilian kills in unjustified wars?
Are people from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sub-sahran africa less horrible to kill than from Ukraine?
I'm not whatabouting, I'm just clarifying what this idea implies
The actual reason why it's "okay" to pay taxes in U.S. is that the media don't demonize U.S. as equally as for Russia, Iran, Taliban, etc.. Therefore, public opinion isn't really going to affect their $$
Ugh.
The significant part here is the new-to-texas SV tech darlings migrating, or attempting to migrate.
The first week there we met a family that had also just moved from a northern state and ended up hanging out with them all summer. The kids were super nice, they played with our 1 year old, who had no one else to play with, being new to the area, for hours on end without any fighting whatsoever. Their son, maybe 7, had long red hair "like Shawn White" who he idolized. A few months later, school started. The first week the family showed up at the pool in our complex and he had cut his hair short. We mentioned it and he ran off, clearly holding back tears. His mom said he doesn't want to talk about it, the kids at school had bullied him so bad he wanted to get it cut.
Never made it to CA but left TX to go back home within just a few months. That story wasn't the only reason but there are plenty of others that made it clear to us TX wasn't a good place to raise a kid.
I never considered myself politically active during that era. I chalked it up to the country mindset. But, since then I've witnessed the rise of their hatred powered by the systems many of us built – social networks and similar technologies. I don't believe either of the two major political parties represent my ideologies and ethics. Instead, I find them both to be trapped in a game of showmanship while wrestling for control of a great nation. Seemingly non-1% citizens loose rights, freedoms, and opportunities to grow as persons. The majority of my high school peers never left their birth town and simply perpetuated the farce taught them in early in youth. The farce being that they own something of America to greater degree than anyone else and that their government owes them everything, but they want to exist without regulation or taxation...and any non-white non-christian non-rural humans. I still can't wrap my head around their logic and I spent a lot of time experiencing a similar existence.
Back to the topic of Texas life. I believe that people born in rural communities like I experienced, would have different belief systems had they been raised in more open and mentally adventurous environments. In other words, their culture is not genetic instead it is more like a meme. Why risk putting our nation's future in stifling cultural states?
As a side note, I witnessed many of my peers turn to drugs like meth and fake cannabis like Spice by the end of high school. Maybe that is the American and I did it wrong.
It's because there's a self-perpetuating safety in it. This is one of the functions of religion: it benefits its in-group by giving them rules about the "right" way to behave, and those rules coincidentally favor conservative behaviors that have the side effect of stamping out individuality and making everything more "the same." And the self-perpetuating part is that groups of people engaging in more conservative, safer behavior thrive (at the expense of individualism). It's compounded by the fact that there's a moral judgment attached to your behaviors, which means it behooves people to be outwardly conforming in order to signal their inclusion in the morally superior group. Long hair on a boy? Well that sure is different, and as everyone knows, different is bad.
This feels really weird when you think about the general western perception of jesus. In damn near any picture he's got a flow going.
Or, put another way, Austin might be the deepest blue on the entire continent but that means little when the state government is in direct opposition, and has been for decades.
Sincerely,
A Georgia Resident
That’s an ironic way of saying you’re pro abortion.
From Scott Aaronson's blog today: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6518
"Most obviously for me, the continued viability of Texas as a place for science, for research, for technology companies, is now in severe doubt. Already this year, our 50-member CS department at UT Austin has had faculty members leave, and faculty candidates turn us down, with abortion being the stated reason, and I expect that to accelerate."
I think if people turn down jobs in states because of restrictive abortion laws, it's because they have so much choice in desirable employers that they can select on issues that almost everyone else would live with, whether they personally approve or not.
And lastly, if anything is going to undermine Austin universities in terms of science research and education, it's the rampant devaluation of academic standards, excessive bureaucratization, grade inflation, and churning out of degrees in exchange for tuition money. Abortion will have little if anything to do with it.
a) I assume you're talking about the past, and not the future.
b) The issue is less that our laws are restrictive, and more that they're written in a capricious, illogical, incomplete, and ignorant way. What do you think is going to happen to people with emergency reproductive conditions (e.g. late stage ectopic pregnancies) when doctors have a prison sentence hanging over their heads if they accidentally terminate a viable pregnancy?
If I was a woman trying to get pregnant, I'd be getting the fuck out of these redstate shitholes because I don't want to die.
EDIT: You seem to have written a reply to this comment and then deleted it. I composed a counter-reply in my head on my walk home from the bar, before seeing that your reply had vanished. That counter-reply was: "Your flippant disregard for human life is as astonishing as it is disgusting."
This decision is going to kill real people with hopes and dreams and loved ones and people who depend on them. If you support it, or publish apologia for it, you are some combination of a moron and/or a monster.
It really is that bad.
The right have been emboldened.
Thomas is no longer afraid to say their goals out loud: they are coming for more rights.
I'm terrified. As a queer person I already feel targeted.
Dehumanization & equating all queer people to pedophiles is a Nazi tactic which allows people to delude & rationalize to themselves that they are actually doing the right thing whilst perpetrating their hate and violence.
Not even going to go on tangent about Thomas' wife. It's the same undeniable b.s. that they espouse at their confirmations: I don't bring my personal (wife's) opinions into rulings (marriage).
Below is my reply, which I am re-writing for context, and I will have to encroach on everyone's trust that what I write below completely represents the original. Whether I am a "moron and/or a monster" I will leave for you all to decide.
I will say, though, that for Americans, the abortion issue is out of the courts and in the purview of federal and state legislatures. We need to have these conversations sooner than later, if not now. There is a real concern about maternal health and freedom, just as there is one about rights to life and protection in utero.
___
I am speaking about the past and present. One should be skeptical of predictions about the future.
The motivation for the decision process you describe is fear. Fear or harm, fear of death. Fear itself is irrational (I do not mean this in a pejorative sense) but powerful emotion, but it is not one that I believe motivates people when they are trying to have children. Pregnancy can have many complications that can be debilitating or even fatal (depression, internal bleeding, sepsis, hormonal dysfunction, and so on), and lack of access to abortion in the case of ectopic pregnancy, for example, is only of many factors that would weight against a potential pregnancy. If lack of access over abortion is an overriding fear for women looking to have children, I suspect that fear could just as easily be replaced by other non-abortion-related dangers. Becoming a parent can be scary, and perhaps now isn't the right time. Maybe later.
Also, I want to stress the earlier point I made about living under laws, good or bad. Women bear children because they want them. I believe this to broadly be true, but the case is especially strong in societies where abortion and more importantly contraception are available. Women bear children because they want to raise them, watch them grow, and start families of their own. Should any complications arise from pregnancy, one adapts and lives with them. Despite the risks, which historically had been far graver until very recently, over 7 billion of us exist. I believe that red state or blue state, abortion or no, people will continue to have children, and they will do so in whatever state they are able to raise them. While it is certainly understandable for women, especially if sexually active, who don't yet want to have children to avoid moving to states with outright abortion bans rather than restrictions to the 1st trimester, I doubt it will be an important consideration for those who want to have them.
To your specific point, if laws are so poorly written that they endanger women's lives, such as in ectopic pregnancies, then I expect the laws will change in response to outrage over deaths. Laws that affect people's lives are unavoidable but can unfortunately cause that to happen (e.g. raising speed limits, drug testing requirements, etc.). However, I am not so pessimistic that to believe that no law can be written as a reasonable compromise. And I never would be so pessimistic so as to give up entirely on elected legislatures and instead choose to live under the fiat of judges in hope that their decisions are optimal. There is certainly precedent for courts to make (very recently, in many eyes) stupidly written, poorly reasoned decisions.
Strong arguments don't lead with transparent emotional projection. If it's important to you to imagine that I am "likely too angry for debate", you are likely already rationalizing an indefensible position you are attached to for whatever reason. Better to abandon it.
Sifting through the largely irrelevant (in the sense of the immediate context of this thread) mountain of words you've dumped here, it seems that the best you can do wrt. the actual substance of my original comment is that women will first have to die to generate "outrage" that will then somehow cause laws to change, to which I think my originally drafted reply suits just fine. Apologia for policy that will kill people is astonishing; it is disgusting; and it is what precisely you are engaging in here.
According to Wikipedia: "Most countries in the European Union allow abortion on demand during the first trimester, with Sweden and the Netherlands having more extended time limits." That's the same as what was once guaranteed in the US under Roe.
Still, 2nd trimester abortions are very uncommon to be legal in Europe. Is there any evidence to suggest that the liberal abortion laws in the US up until today attracted people from Europe to take jobs in the US instead of their home countries with more restrictive abortion laws?
And this decision is arguably the canary in the coal mine; note Thomas’s concurrence. Things could get very, very dark in the more right-wing US states.
I work in D politics and don't think TX will be Dem anytime within the next few cycles. But the trend is there; especially if young people move in.
GA is closer IMHO.
FL is slipping away and illustrates this compounding effect that the GOP has engineered.
Florida's GOP SCO-FL (?) just allowed a really gerrymandered CD map put out by DeSantis, a break with norms.
The map is clearly undemocratic IMHO. 20 of 28 are now pretty safe R. That's very lopsided for the perennial swing state. Even trending +3% R, it should be a toss up.
State and local level is the same story, often worse.
More than people moving away, stopping immigration of young people has a big affect. That's big reason my state of Colorado has turned from purple to fairly solid blue.
Attacking women, queer people, non-religious people, POC, makes the state unwelcoming and even dangerous.
Being a bully gives them more power, which allows them to create more levers and enshrine more advantages to this power.
They have set themselves up to rule a divided states of America where they maintain extreme authoritarian power against the absolute majority.
You're also right in that global warming doesn't give a damn.
Sadly again their blocking of even sensible actions is just another example of what should be a minority party by #s literally killing people who have little power over this situation.
They can't exactly be one to take principled stances can they...
The far-right has themselves a major virtue-signalling epidemic they aren't admitting.
Guess which ones brings more revenue?
Do you see companies moving their offices to places where people have better rights, which usually translates into better salaries, better benefits, better working conditions? No. But they spent lots of money moving their operations to places where people have less or no rights at all.
So it's clearly virtue signaling.
Note that most contraceptives prevent implantation and IVF creates more embryos than needed. Both are no-no’s under the new regime. And miscarriages and stillbirths are going to be a legal minefield there.
This is part of the stated plan: “Josh Hawley says abortion ruling will push people to move states, strengthening the GOP” https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article2...
The sad thing is this comes right as remote work has the potential to do the opposite: bring Americans closer together by allowing more opportunity in states people have been leaving for decades in order to seek opportunity in tech and other industries.
Not saying I agree with either perspective, but I think it's very naive to assume WFH could unite the increasingly polarized american peoples.
I was born in a “conservative state”. For me, it wouldn’t be cultural colonialism but, rather, moving home. For my cousins and friends who are just starting their careers, it’s an opportunity (I didn’t have) to continue to live and work locally.
My assumption is that there are more people in my situation than people motivated to migrate away from their home town with the intent of colonizing other places. Certainly possible my assumption is wrong.
Sounds a lot like “if she floats she’s a witch”
Do you have any examples of specific laws of in any states that would make contraception or IVF illegal?
Most pro-life people are very supportive of IVF as they are all about people having more babies. Many states with anti-abortion laws also have laws explicitly making surrogacy legal (which requires IVF).
These rights and others are directly questioned in the text of the SCOTUS concurrence today: "For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”
Neal Katyal: “That's right to privacy, contraception, marriage equality,etc”
> At the time, a Connecticut law prohibited the use of "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception" and punished anyone who "assists, abets, counsels, causes, hires or commands another" to do so (in other words, it wasn't a crime to sell birth control devices, but it was a crime to use birth control or any drug or medical instrument for the purposes of preventing conception).
> Griswold and Buxton sued the State of Connecticut claiming the law violated their constitutional rights. The issue at stake was whether a married couple had a constitutional "right of privacy" to be counseled in the use of contraceptives.
Three other major cases are cited in that FindLaw article, the most recent in 2014 which took away rights to healthcare coverage.
So is abortion, and yet, it's 2022, and the leopards are eating our faces.
The way SCOTUS works is they render it impossible to enforce a law. It doesn't actually remove the law from the books.
It's a legal hack - the government can't enforce it when its made unconstitutional, but it still exists unless they explicitly remove it. Hence Texas' legal hack of allowing citizens to enforce a law.
It doesn't mention anything about IVF, but as that doesn't involve an abortion procedure it would probably not be affected either. The bill does not propose what you're saying it does.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/19/politics/oklahoma-abortio...
That is a technical fiction. The Supreme Court rewrites laws all the time. They are the line-item veto a President is not allowed to have.
So like you said, the pro-life folks would force every single one to be kept.
What's been produced so far is an article from 2005 (above) about a handful of extreme conservative groups, which has clearly gone nowhere in the past 17 years and a video of Ben Shapiro, whose only job is to say provocative bullshit.
At some point, you have to admit that the "hysterical speculation" is really just foresight given current events.
Will you admit it then? I honestly am happy waiting to reply till then.
If instead you were interested in the opposite result - making women's reproductive rights explicitly legal - what you would need to do in a democracy is convince enough people to vote for the laws you want.
To do that you need to understand what the people you disagree with are actually saying and what the actual words are in the laws that you don't like. Not speculation about what you imagine the logical conclusion of their reasoning is, not what you read in a headline or a tweet about what the law says (those are often misleading and sometimes outright lies), but the real words that are in the law.
From that point you can attempt to address the real arguments that the people you disagree with are really making. Addressing fake arguments that you imagined they made does not convince anyone.
I suspect most states will end up having pretty level headed laws once this all shakes out in 5 years or so with a few outliers on both sides.
Of course that doesn't matter when legislators are not required to not lie in legislation.
"The Industry" is an embarrassment. It is lazy, incompetent, and would be drowning if not for its oligopoly status. Companies who produce useful software will win out over the lackadaisical tech culture that exists today.
What the people bemoaning this decision should worry about is the regulatory backlash against technology--coming from the right--which they totally ignored and pretended was not possible. This decision is a precursor to that inevitability.
There is a very big elephant in the room for where people are moving. And those people are young. And those people do not have the belief monoculture that has existed prior.
Smaller elephant in the room #2 is that cost pressures and globalism don't care about the opinions of the traditional PMC that has reigned supreme when tech was on the upswing.
Every tech worker I know who moved to Austin is here in spite the fact it’s in a conservative state, not because of it.
What it comes down to is the south has nice weather and is relatively underpopulated for historical reasons. Nothing else.
And frankly, having moved from Seattle, ‘powerhouse’ is an overstatement. Austin is a nice place, but has a long way to go in terms of engineering talent.
Then you missed the party. I hate to break it to you. Welcome to being a consumer of tech culture, not a producer of it.
One may ask how many decades it takes for that to happen in the places all the imports are from.
[1] https://countyclerk.traviscountytx.gov/wp-content/uploads/el...
If they did, frankly, they would not vote the way they do. There is a type of cultural elitism, and a freeness that Austin voters have that is not indicative of the SF or Seattle voters. People who have been there any appreciable amount of time understand how much Austin leftists actually dislike the imports.
That is factually inaccurate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manager...
Interesting business decision.
The question I have, some states are going to call abortion murder and charge it as such. Is Google aiding and abetting a homicide?
But, you realize it's largely a question of axioms, right? Two sides are talking past each other because they take their axioms for granted as self-evident.
It's simply a question of a woman's reproductive rights if you take it as axiomatic that a fetus isn't a person.
I don't take it as axiomatic that personhood begins at conception, but if I did, it would all of a sudden be a question of balancing the rights of two people instead of just the woman's reproductive rights. We don't have a clean scientific definition of personhood. The fetus is genetically distinct and is essentially a parasitic larval human. Scientifically, it's just tissue, but so am I. The real question is if it's a person, and that's a legal and moral question that is largely axiomatic.
The reality is that very few of us have a problem with aborting an unviable fetus or early abortion in cases of rape, very few of us support aborting a perfectly healthy fetus minutes before birth, and hard science doesn't provide us many clear lines somewhere in the middle.
Maybe it's purely a legal question, but that's a problem given the current makeup of the Supreme Court.
If it's not scientific, not legal, and not axiomatic, then what is it?
I also believe it has scientific and legal and axiomatic components, just feel quite confident it has to do more with the fear, anger, guilt, shame, and other emotions we feel and attach to things.
What is interesting is that I guess the average google employee is in a good enough position in life to either afford birth control, get an abortion if they need one, or simply figure out how to make an unwanted pregnancy a good situation for their family. So I’m not really sure how this helps their employees other than making them look like they care about the most recent dramatic thing.
Depends what you mean really, as much as 60% are against abortion after a fetus can feel pain (debated: 7-28 weeks), with another 20% undecided and only 20% support abortion.
Most people just don’t know how to have an informed discussion.
What overturning Roe really does is allow states to set the threshold. Roe prescribed a method of determining whether an abortion was legal — “viability”.
Now you can have Colorado having after birth abortions (seriously legislated) and Texas banning abortions after heart beat and Alabama banning all abortions.
Even on the pro-choice side there is a lot of variance on when abortion should be restricted (similar to how Europe restricts abortions the closer to full gestation). Same on the pro-life side, views aren’t binary.
Considering most people don’t understand why Roe v Wade was overturned, I’m not sure opinions on whether it should have been mean much, since belief of what that means is all over the place.
If you asked “would you get an abortion?” The numbers are likely more skewed.
Justice Thomas's concurring opinion literally calls for reconsidering (ie, overturning) Griswold (contraception), Lawrence (same sex relationships), and Obergefell (same sex marriage).
It's perfectly clear that this is exactly what a not insignificant number of conservatives want to do. How is this scaremongering ?
So if you admit he's willing to overthrow the precedent, and you agree that some states would then make those behaviors illegal, then how can you square that circle in your brain to claim it's scaremongering?
After privacy rights, Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and Medicare are all next.
I’ve searched and I cannot find data that say half of America wants abortion made completely illegal (as it is in several states right now and will be in more shortly due to trigger laws).
Can you please share where you get your 50/50 split from?
> Roe v Wade only prevented legislation from finding a solution.
Roe only? Roe made safe abortions available to millions — it reshaped society.
If the argument against Roe is that fertilized embryos are killed, then we need to make sure in-vitro fertilization is stopped where abortion is as well.
As one anti-abortion politician said “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman.”
I don’t believe you and I think you’re the one in the bubble.
Your turn.
Also; did you even read my comment before replying to it? Come on, brother. It is obvious that I am talking about Google employees.
It’s not 50/50 at Google or any of the big tech companies.
https://www.prri.org/spotlight/most-oppose-overturning-roe-v...
Those numbers are far closer to 50/50 than one would imagine in the bubble, but that's also reference to specifically overturning Roe v. Wade, not whether or not abortion should be legal, which is closer to 50/50.
Have a look at the second chart[1]
It's been 'mostly, roughly, steadily ~50/50 'ish' for about 20 years.
I think most self described progressives would be surprised by those numbers, and even the 64/36, as you brought up.
This is a 'big win' for 35% of the country, and another 15% are maybe ok with it, and a few others ambivalent.
That sentiment I think is at odds with the moral outrage felt by ~55% of the country, and it's hard to ingest.
Which makes this a big more difficult to navigate than I think we might normally assume.
I think Google's response is rational, but it's not as 'Black and White' an issue as our 'tech culture instincts' might have us believe.
No, most self described progressives would not be surprised that the numbers are where they say they are.
Literally all throughout this thread people are using these same numbers. I'm curious how far off your perception of progressives is from reality. What numbers do you think we believe are accurate?
Further, _you_ should reference the first chart you linked. It should clearly indicate to you that many who identify as pro-life do indeed support at least partial abortion rights.
85% believe abortions should be allowed in all or some circumstances. 13% believe illegal in all circumstances. Many states under conservative control will go to illegal in all circumstances, so that's the opinion of 13% controlling the freedoms of the other 85%. Not so close to 50/50, huh?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
There are a lot of numbers here. In short, while it has been 50/50-ish for a while, it wasn't in the 90s, and it's not right now. More people, when asked for an opinion, think abortion should be legal than not. And by about a 5-3 or 2-1 margin, more people think and have thought that Roe should be left alone, not overturned.
So I see this as a broadly unpopular decision.
> Second, as I see it, some of the other abortion-related legal questions raised by today’s decision are not especially difficult as a constitutional matter. For example, may a State bar a resident of that State from traveling to another State to obtain an abortion? In my view, the answer is no based on the constitutional right to interstate travel. May a State retroactively impose liability or punishment for an abortion that occurred before today’s decision takes effect? In my view, the answer is no based on the Due Process Clause or the Ex Post Facto Clause.
Also, it could be that better argumentation is needed to seat something as a right. Take gay marriage as an example. If we solely describe it as a contract (not a religious rite), then you can probably lay access to gay marriage within the Commerce clause. Married couples move around. We can't have their marriages suddenly annulled by moving within the US. We don't allow that to happen to other contracts. Yes it might require a destination wedding, but the couple will comeback with all the rights an privileges thereof.
Currently civil marriage is bundled up with other legal issues like immigration, child custody, income taxes, and medical care decisions. But there's no fundamental reason other than tradition why those things need to be coupled. They could all be handled through separate contracts or elective registries.
That doesn't make much sense. So in order to get basic rights that come out of marriage/civil union like hospital visits, power of attorney, inheritance, child support, alimony, splitting assets and children in case of divorce etc. one would need to involve lawyers and sign one-off contracts that cover everything? Sounds like a collosal waste of time and money.
What American government should do and what American government does are fundamentally different things and that ship has sailed. No different than what priests, teachers and actors should do.
that would have an indirect effect on interstate commerce, but I could imagine the Court upholding Mississippi's ban, since it only concerns businesses that operate there.
of course, this would run straight into the Heart of Atlanta Motel decision that ended racial discrimination in hotels.
Do you have any examples or possibilities for a constitutional gotcha under these circumstances?
I'm genuinely asking as I'm not an attorney.
My guess would be something like give each citizens in __ state the power to sue __ for assisting someone to commit a "murder" or "crime of life," whatever insane definition they put into law.
Making "civil suits by private citizens the exclusive avenue of enforcement."
And grants a bounty to encourage this.
Further placing 100% of the burden on the person being sued to prove their innocence (and pay legal fees); doesn't matter the uber driver was just dropping someone off at the airport. Whereas the state would have to prove the crime.
it's the threat, the time, the money, and the inconvenience which creates the deterrence & fear that they want.
No matter how baseless it might be, this whole 'gotcha' is that the Supreme Court won't intervene because - and this is where legal understanding could have nuances - each victim is unique (person being sued civily), and that the relief would be from unique individuals and not the state. SCOTUS "ruling that the providers could not bring suit against the classes of state judges and clerks or the state Attorney General"
Obama in 2009 (the same year he had a supermajority in the legislature): eh, that’s not so important
I have zero faith in Democrats in Congress to actually do this and all of the Republicans in Congress are vocally (or tacitly) opposed to it.
Clinton’s VP pick was an anti-choice Democrat.
I doubt there will be a federal law allowing for first trimester abortions on demand for at least a decade.
So acting like there was some all-powerful supermajority is ignorant at best, misinformation at worst.
(Note: i'm for abortion rules based on sentience level - i think that sentience level of cats/dogs/pigs is where we shouldn't be able to end the life at will while say fish level is ok, chicken is still ok though feels a bit uneasy, and that means as far as i understand about 3, may be 4 months cut-off for abortion in my view (incest and serious genetic defects a bit more complicated, and i think it warrants somewhat later cut-off))
do you have an actual reason for thinking this will happen? this is detached from reality, both of these procedures are meant to create babies which are carried to term, which is the fundamental goal of pro-life policies
At the deep biological level - the fundamental goal of pro-life policies is to enforce r-selection, ie. more random based, whereis pro-choice is K-selection, ie. more managed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory), and like the abortion the IVF, egg freezing, contraception, etc. are all enemies of r-selection while they are tools of K-selection.
>darwinian strategy fantasies
are effects emerging at biological species [sub]population levels, not at an individual level.
For example, you may have noticed that statistically speaking prochoice people and their children are more educated while having less children than the prolifers. That is a typical manifestation of K- vs r-selection differences. The opening of "Idiocracy" is a nice funny commentary on that.
that event is just a wrinkle in the history of our and other species. The natural selection laws didn't start with humans and hopefully wouldn't end with us.
>you are mistaking the result for the agent
in evolution there is no difference between the result and the agent - every agent is a result of previous evolution, and every result of evolution, ie. an individual with specific traits, strategies, preferences, is an agent of shaping of the further evolution. For example the tendency of elephants to have one baby at a time is a result of their evolution and it shapes their future evolution.
>the direct corollary of your argument is that free will doesn't exist
classic anti-Darwinian argument. It is a fallacious argument in its nature as free will is a trait of an individual while Darwinian laws are of large group level.
1. Going to your super cool tech job in California when you get out of college.
2. After that, you get older and want to buy a house and settle down, and not pay state income tax, and so you move out to a red state to work remote and turn it blue with all the love of diversity picked up in California.
Strict abortion laws might serve as somewhat of a barrier to this sort of cultural re-diffusion.
I joked about how woke CA and hate high taxes, but I don't want my life managed by head elected by religious believers/idealogues.
The answer is NO
No thanks. Stay in California, please.
I like Texas as it is. Texas will likely, eventually, end up passing some sort of abortion laws similar to what European nations have - no abortions after 12 weeks, abortions in case of incest / rape, etc.
Frankly, I'd prefer to see Congress get off their ass and do their job and work together on federal abortion laws, since that's... you know... their goddamn fucking job... to pass laws... but we all know it'll never happen because Nancy Pelosi can cry to her ultra-liberal base that, "We TRIED sooooo hard, but the mean ol' Republicans won't let us abort babies 7 seconds before they're born!" and Mitch McConnell can cry to his ultra-conservative base that, "We wanted to meet those baby killers halfway, but they want to abort babies when they're still 16-cell zygotes! Godless heathens!"
And then we end up right back to where we are now, with states deciding... all because we have Congressional leadership and members who are so cowardly they don't understand that their job isn't to get re-elected, it's to pass laws beneficial to the entire nation, with which, the entire nation can live.
Do NOT fund states that suppress our rights.
This is all about status and which states we view as beneath our own. Trying to do economic sanctions as a whole has not been effective in recent state-wide rights deprivation legislation, and I don't think it will do much here either.
We need to expand the court, have a civil war, or something like that. (I'm not sure if I'm kidding anymore, talking to relatives in red states shows a seething hatred of people with my beliefs that makes me think that at any moment all these people may take up arms like on Jan 6. It certainly seems like many have very violent thoughts and view the world as based on gun violence, and think that their blue state "enemies" will come for them wi try guns just as they fantasize about whipping out there own. It's truly sick)
I think something is already inconsolable in this country.
I'm empathetic to the sentiment, but I think we have to be a bit proportional about this kind of stuff, because 'our rights' is a really, really broad thing, and every issue is different.
For example, if this were more of a perfunctory argument about state vs. federal rights, and SCOTUS was really consistent about it, and this was a social issue that got caught up in a legal issue ... and otherwise 'pretty much most states had good rights' on this issue, well, then the whole thing would look different.
So it's hard to make blanket statements about 'rights' and even specific issues are just full of nuance.
It's probably a good decision by Google and they likely should apply some pragmatic pressure to help a resolution on this one.
After Trump/Jan 6/Ongoing investigations, BLM protests, COVID, and literally Russian invasion of a major country, I thought 'Black Swan' season was over! My god man, this is just too much. Yet another 'big fight'. Hey Zeus. It'd be nice to have some centrist consensus on a lot of this because ironically people are not remotely as divided as it seems from the headlines.
I think it's likely best of Bit Tech navigates these issues separately, with careful deliberation, 'doing the right thing' while not getting to populist about it ... because bigger question for Google, is 'what to do next'?.
It'd be nice to be able to vote with my feet on some of these things. If course, most large employers are also overtly against this new decision and doing things like directly funding abortions, so now I have that whole aspect to consider.
Maybe we can work on making it easier for small and medium sized business to offer interstate remote work arrangements? Seems like megacorps have an unfair advantage in dealing with the red tape hiring employees who reside in N different states.
[1] Yes, reasonable people can disagree about when personhood is viable. And yes, I support bodily autonomy when other people aren't involved, including most drug legalization, etc.
Are you worried you'll accidentally have an abortion if you live where it's legal? Or do you just prefer to be physically farther away when other people do it?
At the same time easy abortion makes hookup culture more prevalent which can lead to other problems with societies.
What specifically makes you say this? It seems like one of those "common sense" conclusions that begs to be supported by data. The trend might surprise you. Abortion rates have fallen drastically since Roe v Wade (obviously Roe v Wade didn't itself reduce abortion rates, but improved education and access to birth control has been very effective). Has "hookup culture" also fallen drastically? How are abortions fueling hookup culture if they aren't happening as much?
In 1973, the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion in all 50 states. From 1973 to 1980, the abortion rate rose almost 80%, peaking at 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age ...From 1981 through 2017, the abortion rate fell by approximately one-half.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_Uni...
Nowdays women have sex with me much earlier in the courtship (generally second date), but they still play hard to get and give a masculine vibe, like they were just brushing their teeth. I can't really blame women doing it, as the high budget movies are portraying the same masculine characters in beutiful female bodies.
Another example that I can provide that I see nowdays is that I was trying to date women in my age range (40), and they are feminine, great to talk to, mature, want to have kids, and talk about being so desparate that they are thinking about just asking a friend to make baby with them to raise up solo, which they know is really really hard. I have a great time talking to them, I just more see them as friends than people I would like to have relationship with.
Abortion rights might be good for business.
This is a serious issue and these articles are important. If anything they put pressure on more companies.
i never agreed to be brought into this world, i’ll have you know.
man holding a butterfly: is this <flaming>?
Abortion is an important issue but hardly the only one.