Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

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> but many people prefer the exact opposite

> people leaving abortion-restricting states to less restrictive ones

It's incorrect to claim that people leaving abortion-restricting states to less restrictive ones have the opposite preference to me. My preference, and I'd guess their preference in most cases, is to not allow any state to outlaw abortion. The idea that a woman leaving her own state to get an abortion has the preference of allowing states to decide to outlaw abortion sounds pretty absurd to me.

Furthermore, polls show that the majority of Americans support abortion rights, nationwide. "A record-high 69% say abortion should generally be legal in the first three months of pregnancy." "A 61% majority of Americans think overturning Roe v. Wade, thus ending constitutional protection for abortion rights and returning the matter to the states, was a “bad thing" https://news.gallup.com/poll/506759/broader-support-abortion...

Here's a funny thing (funny as in hypocritical, not funny as in amusing): I've seen too many instances where advocates of "local control" suddenly impose restrictions on local control when they happen to achieve broader power and are able to implement their policy goals. It was never really about local control, it was about winning by any means available.

> My preference, and I'd guess their preference in most cases, is to not allow any state to outlaw abortion.

Yes, but that is the preference of anyone who believes that they're right and the others are wrong. Federalist pro-life voters certainly bemoan that any state allows for abortion.

The whole point of making constitutional amendments is that you either have to:

A.) Have over three-quarters of representatives or states willing to vote with you, demonstrating overwhelming will of the people, or B.) Understand that others disagree with you that the given thing should be codified as a right. In this case, being able to move to places with the rights you want to have enshrined is a good option.

> Yes, but that is the preference of anyone who believes that they're right and the others are wrong. Federalist pro-life voters certainly bemoan that any state allows for abortion.

Yes, I said something similar in my own comment.

> demonstrating overwhelming will of the people

The bar for "overwhelming" is too high. The status quo always benefits certain people over other people. So under this system, the status quo, and the people who already benefit from it, almost always win. And thus I claim, contrary to yours, that the country as a whole never benefits from the system.

> In this case, being able to move to places with the rights you want to have enshrined is a good option.

There's actually an important difference between having a freedom and having a right, and not every freedom needs to be a right. That's because freedom is the default in our system. No action is illegal unless a specific law is passed to outlaw that action. A Constitutional right means that the government cannot pass a law to outlaw an action. The Supreme Court struck down the right to abortion, but it did not thereby make abortion illegal. Women are still free to get an abortion, unless some government passes a law against it, which is now allowed. My point here is that you don't have to support a national Constitutional right to abortion in order to support the freedom to get an abortion. Consequently, there's still no reason to support the right of individual states to outlaw abortion, regardless of the Dobbs decision. The only reason that abortion is illegal anywhere is because individual states have passed specific laws banning it. It's a restriction of the default freedom. The states are the problem here, not the solution. There's no federal law banning abortion.

Of course there's a tradeoff here, because going back to the original long lost topic of the submitted article, regulating tech, if states have the right to pass more restrictive legislation than the federal government, that allows individual states to regulate tech in a way that Congress won't.

On the other hand, big tech companies have already shown the inclination to completely bypass entire states or indeed entire countries, so it's unclear how effectively individual states can regulate tech. And my personal opinion is that it's not a good tradeoff to allow state's rights for good causes when they have been so obviously and pervasively abused for bad causes.

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