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Comment by fruitworks | Hacker News Reader

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That's no middle ground, that's the bare minimum.

Bare minimum for what? Bare minimum to establish a political common ground or whatever?

Bare minimum for basic decency. You can't force someone to live with the result of rape forever on the grounds that a bunch of cells got the same rights as a fully grown human being.

We already let rich people do eugenics in America. See Elon Musk with almost all male babies - this is astronomically against the odds if we assume 50/50 by chance.

Also abortion for eugenics is inefficient and difficult for some women with physical and mental effects - only in the extenuating circumstances like China during one child period would it be viable. This is a side issue from the main point. Ethics in IVF and usage of abortion/Plan B (where it’s so early that it’s not practical for your eugenics idea) - a discussion we should have and have already skipped for IVF in the USA (where it’s more practical from theoretical standpoint for your eugenics point) but it's a distraction from the primary objective of conservative groups - to force women to have less power and choice in their lives. That is the question we see being answered once conservatives gain power to make legislation of their choice in states or via the Supreme Court in the USA.

> if we assume 50/50 by chance

IIRC that is not a safe assumption. 50/50 is a population-wide statistic, but it's pretty common for individuals to have a substantially skewed probability for one gender of offspring or the other.

Your only point is to defend Elon Musk and never addressed the key point instead which is IVF can be used in the USA for eugenics as the other poster suggested abortions hypothetically would be in their horror scenario. Not every clinic but it's available and is not explicitly outlawed - it's only ethically and professionally dubious for certain scenarios. It's also much more practical that trying to use abortions for the same usage in terms of the mother's health.

> Your only point is to defend Elon Musk

Huh?

I'm just an interested party because my family has nearly all girls for an entire generation, so I have paid attention to research that shows how this happens.

You seem to think it disagrees with a conspiracy theory. I don't care about that, I was just adding a bit of accuracy to the discussion. Carry on.

Are you saying that children's sex is heritable? I don't think there is any strong evidence for that (just weak evidence of tiny effects). Or are you just saying that for any 50/50 distribution, there will be some outliers that seem surprising, but are explained by simple statistics?

There are genetic and biological predispositions at the individual level that make some couples more likely to have one or the other gender children. So it is not at all surprising and there are many examples of parents having all boys or all girls, it does not mean they are selectively aborting to achieve a goal.

The predispositions you describe are on the order of 1% which would not explain parents having (say) 5 all boys.

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