Comment by japhyr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by japhyr | Hacker News Reader

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Most people are not using abortion as their default method of birth control.

The term "reproductive rights" is a good phrase because it's all encompassing. Many people think abortion just refers to terminating an "unwanted" pregnancy. But abortions are actually carried out in all kinds of situations. Sometimes the mother's life is threatened by a pregnancy. Sometimes the fetus is determined to have a condition where it will 100% suffer and die within days. Sometimes women choose abortion because they became pregnant after being sexually assaulted.

You don't hear about these situations much because they're so traumatic, people don't talk about them with anyone they don't have to. These decisions really should be left to women and their health care providers.

The people most fervently pushing "pro-life" legislation and policies are pushing to ban it for all of these situations. Women suffer in ways people can hardly imagine when these policies are put into place.

There are no states, that I’m aware of, that would not permit abortions that threaten the mother’s life. I’m about as pro-life as is possible, and I’ve never met a person arguing against saving a mother of it requires terminating a pregnancy.

Elective abortions to kill a child that might die later (AKA mercy killing) have no legal analogue after birth (different from taking off life support after coma, for example).

Most, but not all, bans still allow abortions following rape.

Everything else is hysteria and justification for elective abortions, the fourth leading cause of death in the US (to the tune of 400,000 a year).

The conversation needs to change from women’s rights to human rights. The idea that a human has less rights because of its stage of development is such a regressive, barbarous concept that we need to move beyond as a society.

That’s incorrect, in practice, in Texas. There are states where the government has full power over bodies and does not permit an abortion under any circumstance. A woman cannot get an abortion in a medical facility. The government does not allow it, at all. A woman may request permission from a judge so that government may permit an abortion, but highly unlikely given the woman’s medical circumstances. And, when a woman does request judicial and government approval for her medical procedure, TX Supreme Court has upheld the government’s power to deny it, e.g., see https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/11/texas-abortion-lawsu....

The Texas case is a great example of the hysteria. The risk was to the child, which had a low likelihood of survival after birth, but not a zero chance. There is a woman in her 40s with the condition. Drs. Could not show how it would reasonably harm the mother to carry to term. The abortion guaranteed the death of the child.

I don’t mean to make light of the situation, and knowing your child will have a serious condition prior to birth is devastating and heartbreaking. Learning your child has a serious condition after birth is the same. Only in one of those situations is the option given to end the child’s life without further care.

There is a long line in healthcare between a potential need to terminate a pregnancy and threatening the life of the mother. That line is now being made by politicians and AGs after the facts, not by doctors and patients.

Not dissimilar to the civil rights movement, laws need to be put in place to protect an oppressed population. Humans are humans, why do we have to keep learning this lesson?

> Everything else is hysteria and justification for elective abortions, the fourth leading cause of death in the US (to the tune of 400,000 a year)

No, it is justification to allow doctors and the women who are pregnant to use the extremely complicated and specialized knowledge and unique circumstances of each pregnancy to decide to do what is best for the woman. Something that is impossible, and wholly unnecessary, to codify into law.

As I replied to a sibling comment, if a population is being oppressed, we write laws to protect them.

There, here, and in other places, you have intermittently substituted "population" and "child" for "fetus", and substituted "death" for "abortion of a fetus".

Until sufficient scientific consensus exists to substitute your rhetoric for the scientific terms, the scientific terms should be used. Unsurprisingly, when one does this, the resulting positions aren't very convincing.

It’s somewhat hilarious that the pro-choice camp has decided to go with the same arguments used to justify slavery. Is a minor not a human? A geriatric? Just because a life stage is given a label doesn’t eliminate its humanity (but using the phrase in place of other terms is used to dehumanize).

Your definitions of "population" and "child" would include a cell or two, which most Americans find ridiculous. Sophistry and rhetoric haven't convinced them: most Americans support abortion but oppose murder. The logical conclusion of this isn't that most Americans are experiencing some sort of mass cognitive dissonance, but that your conflation of the two is unconvincing.

Indeed, laws generally apply to "persons" and not "groups of 1+ human cells" for a reason, and the reason isn't mass hysteria. Likewise, scientific consensus has formed around the terms "fetus" and "abortion of a fetus" for a reason, and the reason isn't some grand conspiracy to "dehumanize" groups of cells.

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