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Comment by TheRealPomax | Hacker News Reader

Same reason you might want to avoid "rifle" the day after a mass school shooting. The US is in the midst of an "abortion law" crisis (undoing abortion and birth control rights in order put women "back in their place", rolling back half a century of progress), and now is not the time for the word they replaced.

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That's a gross mischaracterization of what's going on. The fact is the web of tissue-thin Supreme Court decisions never should have taken the place of a law. Congress needs to get off its collective tukus and pass a law; their job as the Legislative Branch.

That they haven't done so is because they want this to be a wedge issue that drives people to go vote. The tenuous nature of privacy precedent was too useful as a political tool to be fixed.

Regardless, I do wish we'd grow thicker skins so that we don't waste time wringing our hands about ordinary words in puzzle games causing emotional trauma.

While you stick to ideals and advocate for how things should work, the reality of how things actually work is that many states as well as the federal government, independently but concerted, are setting back society for women in the US by several decades. So perhaps thicker skin can also include "not minding when someone or some company does something like this, because they understand that sometimes, words matter".

That’s about as fair as a characterisation of that debate as saying “people want to keep R vs. W because they love killing babies”. The simple difference between the sides is one thinks whatever it is that’s in the womb is a human life, the other does not. Both sides’ believe their positions are essentially rooted in compassion — one for the adult, one for (according to their understanding) the child.

What child?

And that's the problem: people who have no idea how human biology works pushing for laws that relate to human biology.

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