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Comment by youdontknowtho | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to make abortion seem barbaric in a HN comment thread. The lives of people are complicated and messy. Your opinion about how other people should conduct their personal lives shouldn't extend to family planning. Period.

If we are being honest, open heart surgery is barbaric. They cut people open and then break all their ribs.

It's not assault or murder, for a variety of reasons that I'm not going to go into.

Further, experience tells me that granting good faith in these arguments is usually a bad idea. I oppose the right-wing on every issue. Abortion is particularly important in this context because it normalizes state based oppression against women.

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"Your opinion about how other people should conduct their personal lives shouldn't extend to family planning."

So the poster shouldn't have an opinion?

"Further, experience tells me that granting good faith in these arguments is usually a bad idea."

Isn't granting good faith to others' arguments one of the cherished ideals on HN?

Do you grant creationists good faith? How about anti-vaxers? Flat earthers?

People have been using free speech absolutism over the last couple of years to popularize poisonous ideas. Should we keep letting that happen?

EDIT: Maybe they have an opinion, but frankly that lot don't spin this as an opinion. It's barbarism. It's murder. It's evil. Don't act like their isn't a larger context to all of this.

I just think full term fetuses deserve at least as much legal protection as a pet dog. It's pretty awful to kill a pet when animal shelters are a thing.

I understand the desire to group that opinion along with PizzaGate or some other toxic nonsense. That's exactly the sort of cognitive dissonance I'm talking about.

I am actually sympathetic to and support single mothers in all sorts of ways, not that people should have to qualify philosophical opinions with virtue signalling.

According to the Humane Society 2.4 million healthy cats and dogs are euthanized each year in US animal shelters:

https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/pets-numbers

It's very sad but legal.

"Do you grant creationists good faith? How about anti-vaxers? Flat earthers?"

Yes. All of them.

I've never had to do so with a flat-earther simply because I've never met one.

But the others? Sure, I treat them like human beings.

Marginalizing people for their beliefs will not change their minds but it WILL fracture society. I think some people will side with the "opposing view" simply because they are indignant when they see how the sanctimonious mob treats them.

Like I said, nothing happens in a vacuum. People in the anti-abortion camp routinely call people evil, demon possessed, and immoral. They have killed people. There are bills passing now that force women to undergo unneeded medical procedures.

Somehow I'm being sanctimonious because I'm not going to pretend that there is no historical context to all of this.

That's what they have been doing this whole time. The far-right pushes against the bounds of decency and then the center-right says that you aren't being civil when someone brings it up.

I'm not marginalizing anyone. I'm just not going to pretend that there is no larger context.

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