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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

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This is a shocking take. I can personally attest (in my 40s) to the pressure felt from professionals during the foetal abnormality scan, pregnancy especially a first time pregnancy is an incredibly vulnerable and difficult experience where those you're surrounded with in every context have massively outsized influence on your otherwise clueless state.

Our baby had no abnormalities, but the language and presentation of the doctor almost had me ready for violence. It's easy to understand from his perspective - he must dehumanize the thing in many cases he is going to encourage you to abort, and if that is what he recommends, it's a recommendation that would have carried tremendous authority for both parents, who would then have immediately acted upon each other.

I feel this isn’t so generous a response. This person is describing their lived in experience, coloured by the time and experiences they’ve had since. They certainly recognise that it would have been a moment that had things transpired differently would have dramatically altered the course of their life.

I read their remarks as a somewhat mournful expression of a desire to follow “the road not travelled”.

I honestly don’t know how you can say this. When my son was born, we were asked enough times about circumcision that it seemed like a battle to get to “no”. (USA)

The system has a system and a narrative. If you’re working against the narrative you have to be very prepared.

It's less that hospitals are pushing circumcision and more that there's a discharge checklist everyone is working from and the circumcision question is on it. The repetition is some combination of verifying your answer and/or people not reading the notes other people have written when they document your answer. If your answer were "yes, we want a circumcision," they'd be asking you repeatedly just the same until they actually did it.

It shouldn't even be legal, much less on a checklist. Doctors will swear up and down on their oaths or whatever other high horse when it comes to euthanasia, but mutilating children without their consent is all good!

> I honestly don’t know how you can say this. When my son was born, we were asked enough times about circumcision that it seemed like a battle to get to “no”. (USA)

Also USA but opposite experience: They asked about circumcision as a checklist item but there was absolutely no pressure at all.

It could have been a location specific culture thing, or you might have mistaken their routine checklist as pressure. Hospital personnel get blamed if parents go home without being offered all of the services, so they’re under pressure to make you aware of it and confirm your no.

The system indeed has a narrative and plan and if you don’t actively work against it, you get it.

And it switches relatively quickly (all the propaganda is anti-dikksnip at our birth center now).

I read a lot of stupid, vapid, ridiculous things frequently posted on Hacker News, and this is not one of them. It's just a human experience.

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