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Comment by cato_the_elder | Hacker News Reader

They have to comply with the law, and there's nothing wrong with anti-abortion ads. Facebook doesn't have an obligation to only sell ads to Democrats.

> subequently made that information available to anti-abortion groups

That part is probably misleading, I'm assuming they didn't give them any kind of information, they just allowed demographic targeting like they do for most kinds of ads.

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But there's also no law against posts providing information on "acquiring abortion pills such as mifepristone"; Facebook is choosing to remove such posts.

There's also no law restricting guides on how to turn any rifle into an automatic machine gun... but Facebook chooses to remove those too.

There is no equating healthcare to gun rights - one of these is used to make lives better and the other is used to destroy them.

I'm 100% pro-abortion-rights but I can still accept that abortion is an act of destroying a life. Even in the case of taking abortion pills. But obviously most of us consider there to be a huge difference in ethical significance between destroying the life of an embryo and that of a fully grown independent human.

I think this is the tragedy of America - in Canada abortion is enshrined as a human right that helps to protect the lives of young people who have made a mistake instead of dooming them to a life of misery (and their future children with them).

Only in America has the continuous rhetoric actually forced the idea that abortions are murder out of the fringe crowd and into the common understanding. That is truly sad.

Canada sends people to the US for abortions:

https://globalnews.ca/news/7868372/coronavirus-covid-pandemi...

Canada's abortion laws are more restrictive than what was under Casey.

No more than excising a cancer is, before the age of viability. Early on, it's just cells.

Cancers don't become cooing babies if left alone to grow.

Even if you are pro-choice, comparing an unborn child to a disease that kills millions is a poor move.

It's part of the rhetoric--the rationalization.

I don't think cancer qualifies as "a life" at all sorry. Taking anti-biotics to kill a bacterial infection might be a better comparison.

Later on, it's also just cells. That kind of naive reductionism leads us to reducing a human being to cancer.

I don't think a comparison between an abortion pill that terminates fetuses and a firearm are that different. Both can be used for good or bad.

I don't think he's equating them as identical situations. He's using analogy to explain that Facebook's acceptable ad policies are not exactly the same as US law - and that Facebook doesn't get selective solely in the area of abortion.

That's called "misinformation" now. If you disagree, join the club.

Not explicitly, but there are laws against providing illicit access to abortion, and this can be reasonably interpreted as such.

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