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Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

Ignoring abortion, I suspect that states without contraception, IVF or gay rights will be of less interest to a significant portion of the tech workforce. Companies would have to provide alternatives unless they want to limit their hiring to red state natives. Good argument for wfh to get talent that just won’t go there.

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.

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> suspect that states will be of less interest to a significant portion of the tech workforce.

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.

I don't think remote work would result in bringing us together at all, quite the opposite actually. Frankly, the existing populations in the states people have been leaving for decades are very culturally different than your average remote worker. The local population will see this as cultural colonialism by coastal elites, and the remote workers will wonder why they aren't welcomed, all while driving up local house prices/rents, overtaxing the already crumbling infrastructure, and causing those places to lose their "local charm".

Not saying I agree with either perspective, but I think it's very naive to assume WFH could unite the increasingly polarized american peoples.

Valid point. There are certainly negative scenarios and those need to be considered seriously.

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.

No way. A ton of people, myself included, sees wfh as a ticket out of regressive hellholes.

“Prove you had a miscarriage“ Shudders

Sounds a lot like “if she floats she’s a witch”

Essentially a summary of the world at large.

> Note that most contraceptives prevent implantation and IVF creates more embryos than needed. Both are no-no’s under the new regime.

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).

> Do you have any examples

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”

https://twitter.com/neal_katyal/status/1540341236803977216

I mean examples of laws. Like is there any state that has passed or even proposed a law saying "contraception is illegal". To my knowledge, there's not.

Here you go: https://www.findlaw.com/family/reproductive-rights/griswold-...

> 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.

The "at the time" was 1965. Contraception was new and controversial 50 years ago. It's not anymore and is widely supported. Is there any current law or proposal to outlaw contraception? Such a law would be wildly unpopular, even among most pro-life people.

> It's not anymore and is widely supported.

So is abortion, and yet, it's 2022, and the leopards are eating our faces.

I dunno, the comstock act?

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.

Which is completely fucking bonkers and should be squashed ASAP, lest these states go completely rogue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut

Every state that defines life begins at conception rather than heartbeat or viability. The supremes already mentioned contraception and ivf willingly discards embryos that are not needed.

The supreme court doesn't write laws, they only interpret them. Laws are very specifically written and often include enumerated exceptions and specific scenarios. They don't just say "Life begins at conception and that's that".

Oklahoma has proposed. Supremes removed all limits on laws. “Not mentioned in constitution” applies to all sorts of things.

> Though the bill considers a pregnancy to begin at fertilization, and not implantation, the bill does not restrict the use of forms of contraception that prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in a uterus. According to the bill, abortion "does not include the use, prescription, administration, procuring, or selling of Plan B, morning-after pills, or any other type of contraception or emergency contraception."

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...

> The supreme court doesn't write laws, they only interpret them.

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.

You don't have to like it. This is literally the system we suffer.

It's not about making it illegal, it's that IVF typically results in more fertilized embryos than are kept.

So like you said, the pro-life folks would force every single one to be kept.

Do you have an example of any pro-life lawmaker, pundit, anyone demanding that all embryos from IVF be kept?

Yes.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-politics-of-the...

This person is in no way interested in facts, they'll move the goalposts again after it becomes widespread practice.

I seem to be the only one interested in facts rather than hysterical speculation. The facts are nobody can produce a law or proposed law banning contraception or IVF or requiring every embryo to be used.

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.

Okay, I will make a note to reply to you again when these things come to pass.

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.

It seems like you want these things to happen so you can gloat and say "I told you so"

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.

Yes, Ben Shapiro. IVF is slippy slope. Don't make any more embryos than you will implant and carry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cETGY6U9wfQ

This is a natural result of placing the cutoff at conception.

No, it's not the natural result of anything. Like I said above, laws are very specifically worded in what they allow and prohibit. They are written by and for human beings. They are not computer programs which mindlessly execute every possible logical consequence.

Technically you can donate the unused embryos, though I don’t know how that would work legally.

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.

Question is: how many women die preventable deaths in the meantime? Will she be your mom? Your girlfriend? Your sister? You?

Of course not, but that is the natural progression of forcing evangelical/Catholic morals on all Americans as current Republican leadership is pushing for. I hope it blows up in their face and Americans wake up to the coming Republican attempt to install Trump as dictator for life.

Contraceptives prevent fertilization, not implantation.

Of course that doesn't matter when legislators are not required to not lie in legislation.

I suspect, having had a long career in tech, no one of import will care.

"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.

Err, having had a long career in tech, I’ve found that companies like to hire younger people. Those who might be sexually active, considering starting families and trying to balance career requirement vs pregnancies. Such as young professors, rising developers, pretty much every aspect of stem. While the regulatory backlash is a concern, I would think that attracting or keeping staff is a larger concern.

And I, having seen Austin, TX grow from a laughingstock to an industry powerhouse, find your points humorous.

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.

Sure we believe in the ‘monoculture.’

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.

> 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.

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.

Austin is a long way from being a "tech powerhouse"

Well, perhaps. But at least when they had homeless people dying on the streets and shit all over the place, they finally cleaned it up in a little over a year.

One may ask how many decades it takes for that to happen in the places all the imports are from.

Take a look at the voting numbers for Austin, TX. It's overwhelmingly democrat. 71% of Travis County votes were for Joe Biden[1]. The people moving to Austin are no different from the people that moved to San Francisco or Seattle in the first place.

[1] https://countyclerk.traviscountytx.gov/wp-content/uploads/el...

Dude, you do not understand Texas Democrats. And Texas Democrats do not understand you.

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.

I live in Austin.

That is factually inaccurate.

PMC?

I think it stands for Professional Managerial Class.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manager...

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