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Comment by samscully | Hacker News Reader

Abortion of a foetus with an identifiable disability is considered acceptable today by many people, which is similar in spirit if not in practice to eugenics.

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I'm sorry, but no. There's no equivalence in spirit between a crying mother deciding that it's in the best interests of her family to terminate a pregnancy and a bunch of scary-eyed fanatics trying to make humanity "better".

I'm assuming you've never known anyone go through that. It's a personal tragedy, not an intellectual issue.

Argument from emotion.

Yes. Because we are humans, not Vulcans.

Someone saying: "Don't hit me, please" is also an argument from emotion.

That's not an argument, it's a request.

Swooping down to declare a fallacy then immediately swishing your cape and dashing away is highly unlikely to gain much social traction or admiration.

Also, when arguing if something is in a particular spirit, it's appropriate to discuss emotions and principles.

It was just a brief way of saying, "All you've communicated is that the equation of the two doesn't feel right, without giving anyone a reason to deem your view more persuasive."

This is basically what happened:

A: That seems dangerously close to eugenics, in that it's weeding out people with bad genes.

B: Oh yeah? If you distorted your view by listening to crying moms who agree with me (and not similar weepers on the other side), you'd agree with me.

Me: Argument from emotion.

Let's try something a little more intellectual: there's also the aspect that eugenics is an idea directed to the improvement of humanity (an idea I'm... suspicious of) and abortions are decision by individuals reflecting individual circumstance. I don't believe these decisions are made on the eugenics basis: that disabled people are somehow worse than other people.

Eugenics is relatively easy to judge: you can get all the facts. Individual decisions are always harder: you don't know the full circumstance. I'm not saying that their aren't abortions made for obscene reasons (terminating girls is an obvious example), but not all are.

I claim that any argument about "in spirit" is necessarily about emotion. The original statement struck me as veering pretty close to Godwin's law.

Argument from fallacy.

"terminate a pregnancy"? Is there a name for the practice of using more convoluted words so as no to make people focus on the real meaning of the sentence? You could have used "terminate the carrying developing offspring within the body, by terminating said offspring's capacity for metabolism, growth or reaction to stimuli". OTOH, you mention "a crying mother", which IMHO should be compared to the other tragedy: "an innocent baby being torn apart, aspirated, poisoned or killed in some other way"

And there goes my karma down in 3,2,1,...

Hang in there, brother! :) You still have like 5 points of karma.

Believe me, I'm not trying to avoid the full meaning of the words. I'm merely pointing out that, contrary to what some people seem to wish to believe, the people making these decisions aren't avoiding them either.

The problem is: there's no good words to use, because they've been co-opted by political positions and value judgements. "Baby" indicates you're anti-abortion, "foetus" indicates you're pro-abortion. I went for pregnancy, because that implies the "potential to be a baby".

"Terminate" has the same problem. What are the alternatives? "Abort" is pretty much taken by the pro-lifers. It's such an emotive issue that in the UK, where there is no broad based political movement that wishes to outlaw it, medical professionals don't even have a word for it. They have words for specific procedures like EPRC, and as far as I can tell they change those terms every couple of years. And of course, the terminology is the same whether the pregnancy is still ongoing or not.

"You ever noticed how there are no abortion doctors, only 'reproductive health physicians'?" -> no comedian's routine

I apologise, my comment was far too cold towards people who have been presented with that very distressing choice, I should have thought more carefully about it before posting.

I'd say the reverse: that selective abortions are (maybe, in some cases) similar in practice, but not in spirit to eugenics. The difference is that eugenics had an imperative to it. They wanted to 'improve the human race' through selective breeding of humans. They were concerned about the population genetics as a whole, not an individual.

And yes, it was very much an accepted area of thought and research in academia from the late 1800s to the end of the second world war. It wasn't until it became associated with Nazi Germany that the idea became taboo.

Or abortion of foetus if she's a girl. Or of a foetus of whatever gender if "we're too many", and one more would mean less confort for the others, less education, less whatever.

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