Not particularly keen to get in an abortion debate on HN of all places.
That being said, regardless of anyone's political stance, you saying 'because you made bad decisions' is inflammatory, and clearly based on the assumption that the pregnancy was a result of fully consensual sex.
Even in the 1970s, women had condoms and birth control pills.
You're going to be hard-pressed to find a reasonable, thinking individual who would not allow for abortion exemptions for rape / incest / endangerment of the mother.
We're on Hacker News. A place where - supposedly - thinking people comment.
You "Don't be that guy."
It shouldn't even be necessary for me to have had to type this.
If you’re argument hinges on “reasonable, thinking” individuals, and you’re claiming that Alabama law didn’t meet that standard, then I would argue your “thinking” standard is completely irrelevant. The only relevant criteria is what makes it into law and affects people.
> Everyone at the time recognized that Roe v. Wade was shitty law, but they put their objections on the back burner and kicked the can down the road so they wouldn't have to have the Mother of all Debates.
Well, no. It codified roughly what the public thought was appropriate at the time - the stable achievable policy equilibrium. And in the past 50 years, public sentiment has remained mostly unchanged; it's just trended a tiny bit towards more permissiveness around abortion.
> Two years after the court’s decision, 54 percent of U.S. adults said they supported abortion under certain circumstances and another 21 percent said abortion always should be legal, according to Gallup polling from 1975, while 22 percent of Americans said it should be illegal.
> By 2018, Gallup pollsters found little change [...]
It also can be argued that overturning Woe v. Wade was good, because it put it into the hands of legislators. It was shitty law because it instituted a right where none was. Thus, it kept legislators from legislating on an evolving issue.
There are many who argue that no specific law is necessary, that the Constitution gives the right of privacy and bodily autonomy, and that Roe v Wade correctly asserts that constitutional right.
Do you need a specific law protecting the right to throw a barbecue, own a dog, or read books on dangerous topics? No, because the Constitution is a framework which broadly allows actions by people, and carves out specific things that the government has control over.
(In my 1960s Catholic family, my parents encouraged us four kids to discuss issues of the day at the dinner table. One night the discussion was about abortion, and specifically, when does a fetus become human. My dad joked that he often wondered whether fetuses didn't become human until they could cut their own meat ....)
You don't have the right to kill another person. You don't even have the right to kill most animals without sufficient reason (hence hunting permits, fines for not properly caring for agricultural animals, etc.).
The point, which ought to be obvious to HN readers - and would have been 10 years ago - is that we as a nation never sat down and decided, "What constitutes a person?"
Personally I'm on board for telling you what you can do with your uterus in the same way European nations are - you have 12 weeks to decide. After that, you keep the baby and it's illegal to abort it. I believe every single one of the vaunted Scandinavian nations has a 12 week limit on abortion. Many tech people want to model society after them, so there you go. Start there.
Well, thanks for the strawman. When you debate in strawman arguments, you block constructive debate from moving forward. The issue is one of judicial discernment. It is the ability for a supreme court to make up rights not written into the constitution. This is not difficult to recognize, whether you are pro-choice or pro-life. The correct place for this is in legislation. It is an emotional topic that is constantly evolving. What is going to happen when a fetus can survive in an artificial womb? We are a long way from that, but that is something a council of unelected justices should not have to rule on.
> What is going to happen when a fetus can survive in an artificial womb?
We're going to see a wave of hilariously (in the worst possible way) maladapted babies, because I'm almost certain we'll find that the constant "noise" of the mother's body, plus hormonal changes, are critically important for proper development.
Sure, maybe researchers and scientists will factor all of this into the development of such a technology, but so far Humanity doesn't have a good track record with getting everything right on the first go-round.
