Because "abortion" is a hot political issue in the US, and a word that pushes lots of people's emotional buttons. And because anyone using less-button-pushing words to describe things is a for-sure loser in the Darwinian attention economy.
US public perception might have swung to favor a different weighting, but not following this is clearly far from "not wanting to talk about it".
I still think it is a great example for this HN thread though, as having different opinions is suddenly perceived as a hostile act with - presumably - mean intentions.
The thing about abortion that most people seem not to understand is that the debate is fundamentally about answering "when does human life start?". One side believes it starts at conception, which equates any abortion with murder. The other side believes it starts at some point after that, which makes abortion up to that point a women's health / rights issue. Irreconcilable, but also toxic when the two sides never talk about what they actually disagree on, but instead call each other murderers or anti-women's rights or whatever.
I don't think that's where the front of any sort of meaningful battle lies, both are often a term of convenience or familiarity and not necessarily from an underlying agenda around abortion rights.
Further, attempt to stick to those words when consoling someone who lost their wanted pregnancy would come across as needlessly callous. . "I'm so sorry you lost that fetus, that's really tough experience for many formerly-pregnant people"
I considered for a few minutes that you might have meant "people who aren't pregnant with the specific fetus in question should shut up".
But I ruled it out confidently: The situation where a bunch of people are weighing in on a specific abortion is not one that really comes up, whereas people discuss abortion in general nonstop. You had just said that you aren't opposed to the other potential parent and medical professionals having input in a specific abortion. It doesn't make any sense to phrase that idea that way- having a functional uterus has no bearing on whether you're the one who is considering an abortion. And the other reply also interpreted you as saying men shouldn't comment on the issue and went uncorrected. Taken together, I thought there was no way that was what you meant and I was being excessively charitable.
I misunderstood, but I think you could have been clearer.
From context, I can tell we have similar views on how society should decide the question “what options should a pregnant person have?”
Even with that agreement, I don’t see how our views are rooted in some fundamental truth that precludes someone from arguing the opposing point of view (or arguing that the cutoff from one conclusion to the other is at a different number of weeks; I do not believe abortion should be generally legal at 39 weeks, nor at 38 weeks, ...)
I'm gonna take a stand here and say that up until extremely recently in the US, parenthood almost invariably was a deliberate decision. When abortion was legal in all 50 states and programs were available that offered free family planning services (contraceptives and abortions) to low-income households who might not otherwise have the means to access these services, parenthood became almost ubiquitously optional.
In any case, the woman has, at minimum, several months of time between the moment she becomes aware of a pregnancy and the moment a viable, live birth occurs.
Since the 70's, PP could get you in same week for an abortion. It didn't matter what the pregnant woman's skin color, income/wealth, zip code, age, disability, national origin, religious views, or any other bit of demographic data was - this was something rapidly and easily accessible to anyone with thousands of locations across the U.S.
Granted, this has regrettably changed in recent times, so I'll give you that.
On a tangent - it's so bizarre to me that when the conservatives who can almost incessantly be found talking about the importance of "small government" finally seized a modicum of real power in the US via SC majority, some of their very first actions were increasing the scope of the rules and regulations of big government. :|
It should be noted that this is a rare and unpopular opinion. The overwhelming majority of people are going to be disgusted by a 32 week abortion on either side of the issue.
Well certainly not you, you can't even remember the age. But all too happy to repeat the ole "don't politicize it" talking point. It's a political point because it is the 100% predictable outcome of these abortion policies.
Heh. I should have known better that people would get stuck on this. Try find people to follow on Twitter with a nuanced view on abortion, somewhere between at right before birth and never.
As an American, Americans have a habit of taking anything around pregnancy that mentions the word "life" to mean a pro-life/anti-choice stance, even if the context is from regions of the world without such a distinction. The response varies by audience, but the response on HN to anything approaching pro-life/anti-choice is usually downvotes.
It’s really weird that the issue of abortion doesn’t (at least not from what I have seen) circulate around the issue of weeks. Instead it’s dogmatically and totally for or against total bans.
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