The system is broken, etc. etc. Might as well play the long game.
I'd respect someone more if they strongly believed that women should have to endure that hardship, because it takes some serious principles to confront that issue and come out thinking the state should be demanding women carry hostile pregnancies to term. But your comment suggests they should just so you can keep torrenting The Avengers.
I don't want to know these things about people on HN, so I flagged this story, unflagged it, hit my keyboard a couple times, and then flagged it again.
We can't afford to ignore a slowly-worsening trend that hurts everyone because of issues that are rare but acutely bad.
Holy fuck I'm out of here until the election is over.
I'm pretty sure my wife would rather be water boarded than be forced to go through pregnancy and birth involuntarily. I'm not even joking.
On the same token, Democrats are not going to ban guns or Religion, which is the Republican "base rattler".
I agree with Angersock that people let these types of issues get in the way of fixing the real big problems.
Well, you might say, people shouldn't legislate that way. But they do. And even if you don't follow every bill, it should be obvious to even a casual political observer that the 112th Congress has been especially contentious in this regard.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0211/GOP_senators_...
Really?
I had no idea it was anywhere near this high. Do you have any source to back that up?
The closest thing I could find was this: http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html
Though this site is about as biased as you can be so it's probably not the best source.
Do you seriously not think any of the pro-life positions are even worth debating? And that preventing even marginal restrictions on abortion is worth killing the internet? (the partial-birth abortion ban was the biggest pro-life victory in years).
All I sense from you is anger and contempt, no intellectual engagement. That's not going to win over people who don't already agree with you.
I sympathized with Hillary Clinton's formulation that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare". The new abortion-absolutism says it should be "ubiquitous, easy, and subsidized". I don't agree with that. I still find late-term abortion nauseating, and early-term abortion regretful.
Am I an evil monster for thinking this way? Am I completely beyond the pale of polite opinion? Am I not worth debating?
There is no "abortion absolutism." Abortion rights have been scaled back dramatically since Roe. That's just plain fact, and it's dishonest to imply otherwise. The battleground is now over things like notice requirements and trans-vaginal ultra-sounds for abortions during any stage of pregnancy. And indeed, the battle ground is far closer now to "protecting any sort of abortion rights at all" than it is to "ubiqtuous, easy, and subsidized." What a totally dishonest characterization of the actual facts. The abortion rate fell 30% from 1990 to 2008, and has fallen in the past four years.
Must... resist... politics...
Okay, I can't resist. No one in elected office has said that they want to subsidize abortion. They probably should (at least for early term ones), but the fact is they don't.
Nor has anyone ever argued that abortions should be "ubiquitous." Seriously: can you provide a statement from anyone, ever, who says that every woman should be forced to get abortions?
Lastly: "easy." Okay, this is probably a position genuinely and widely held throughout the Democratic Party. Abortions should be easy: you shouldn't have to go through three doctor's appointments, have a rod shoved into your vagina, and be yelled at and have your picture taken and posted online when you go to a clinic for a legal procedure. That's an accurate statement of an actually-held position, but that position is hardly beyond the pale.
In my book, abortion carries more moral importance than, say, clipping a toenail. Partial-birth abortions, while rare, were barbarous. I understand state populations that want to have waiting periods and such things.
Ideally, society should offer support and education such that fewer abortions occur.
Like making birth control available? That and real sex education help a lot.
And it makes no sense. Unless you're ideologically opposed to any sort of government subsidy, contraception has got to have the best return on a per-dollar basis.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/magazine/charmaine-yoests-...;
And when the interviewer pointed out there was a 60-80% drop in the abortion rate (compared to the nat'l average) among women in St. Louis who received free contraception for three years, Yoest refused to discuss it, calling it a "red herring."
These activists can say "life begins at conception" til they're blue in the face, but every major medical organization defines pregnancy as the implantation of the fertilized egg in the uterus. Why do we need more unwanted children in this country when it's so preventable?
Everyone has to make judgement calls with their votes, that is how democracy works. There are some people who have little interest in the internet, there are some that don't have an opinion on a woman's right to choose. This doesn't make them bad people, it just means that the issues that drive their votes are different than the ones that drive your own.
If these issues had a broad consensus they wouldn't be such big election topics. Believe it or not, there are some people voting for candidates because they are pro-life, if there weren't then candidates would not publicize their stance on the topic.
And I thought I was the only one who felt so painfully conflicted about the whole realm of politics on HN. I sometimes wish I could have HN-quality level discussions about real political issues, but I fear that's not realistic.
I like the idea of an online discussion group for political junkies like myself that is either invitation-only or aggressively monitored for civility. Maybe I'll have to make one.
This is why politics should be ruthlessly banned here. Much like the Beastmaster was destined to overthrow evil, political discussions are destined to turn sour.
I do, because equitable access to information through a global network is as fundamental a human right as I can imagine. Maintain the network and peoples' right to self-expression on it, and I have to believe the other problems will solve themselves.
Meanwhile, abortion is just a wedge issue, IMHO. Most threats to reproductive freedom in the US are empty ones. The GOP (and the judges they appoint) will never repeal Roe v. Wade, because as soon as they do, they will no longer be able to use it to scare up votes from the Slow Folk. Instead, they will have woken a sleeping dragon and filled it with a terrible resolve. Even the dumbest Republican legislator has got to understand that.
Likewise, same-sex marriage rights are as inevitable as Loving v. Virginia was. The Republicans screaming and yelling about it today will spend the rest of their careers trying to make people forget they ever had an opinion on the subject, just as their fathers had to do with respect to the Civil Rights movement.
In general the Religious Right has a long history of being courted with wine and roses by the GOP and then left crying at the altar. One thing you can say about social conservatives of all stripes is that they have a boundless respect for history and tradition and zero interest in learning from either.
A free Internet, however, is not an inevitability. It will have to be fought over. It's the biggest deal there is, because it can and will change things. If you don't believe that, we won't agree on much else.
Abortion is one of the biggest issues in terms of dollar value. There are two inescapable facts of life: people will have sex, and contraception even properly used has relatively high failure rates (1-3%). The availability of reproductive services is responsible for women being able to participate in the economy as opposed to being stuck in childbearing roles as they have been historically. They are far, far more important than SOPA.
I'll observe that being pregnant does not preclude you from participating in an information economy or from working at a desk--I haven't tried that, personally, so I may be wrong. I would love to hear about how pregnancy negatively impacts information workers.
I do have issue with the "fully half" population--you can't simply suggest that all of the women are trying to conceive all the time. This seems to be intellectually dishonest.
Anyways, note that we've successfully fought for abortion rights for decades now, and trends seem to suggest that, despite the alarming ignorance of some of the population and congressmen, we will continue to do so.
SOPA (and the Patriot Act, and PIPA, and so on) represent a new threat to civil liberties and the economy (I would be unsurprised to find out that there is more money in user-generated content than birth control). We owe it to ourselves and our children to try and mitigate this threat now before it becomes an issue later.
My wife is at 9 months now. She could barely get through her finals during her first trimester. Second trimester was fine, but third trimester she has been completely exhausted. She's also chock-full of hormones that make her extremely emotional and make it hard to focus (and she is one of the most coldly rational people you'll ever meet).
> I do have issue with the "fully half" population--you can't simply suggest that all of the women are trying to conceive all the time. This seems to be intellectually dishonest.
Pretty much every woman will be sexually active through most of her life, and will be able to get pregnant for several decades of her life. While only some percentage are actually trying to conceive at any time, failure rates with contraception are substantial even when they aren't.
Also, you can't just look at the cost of pregnancy. Adoption isn't a catch-all solution in a world without abortion. Remember orphanages? That's what we had before abortions. The adoption system can absorb most unplanned babies now, but only because most unplanned pregnancies aren't carried to term. And adoption can be a huge emotional burden that along with family pressure forces women to keep their babies. Having a simple first trimester abortion is a completely different ordeal than carrying a baby to term and giving it away. As I said above, I'm pretty sure my wife would rather be waterboarded than go through a pregnancy she didn't want. And once motherhood is in the picture, the dollars-and-cents cost is astronomical. When you put a dollar figure on the direct and opportunity costs of being a mother, they're mind-boggling.
I'm curious where you stand on sterilization--if there is no desire to conceive, it might provide a more reliable form of birth control than the alternatives.
Thank you for the information about how pregnancy impacts student life. I had meant "precludes" in the strictest "not physically impossible" sense, but clearly there are side-effects that make life harder even if you can show up to work.
I haven't seriously considered it and was approaching it more from a curiosity point of view, but the reaction I got was mindblowing. You are pretty much interrogated about and judged on why you're asking about it even if the doctor has no intention to perform any such procedure on you ("it's for your own good"), and sometimes it doesn't even matter that you already have kids. One of my friends has even gone to multiple doctors to find one that would tie her tubes despite having 3 kids in a marriage going on 15 years and problems with most forms of birth control. (I have no idea how men fare in this regard.)
The other unfortunate thing is that there's still no 100% effectiveness with almost all methods of sterilization: worst case it's no better than near perfect use of the pill, best case it's just slightly better than IUDs/implants - it's a matter of arguing whether one or a couple of 9s go after 99%. The only real benefit is that it's a do-it-once-and-forget type of thing as well as something men can do, unlike IUDs that need replaced every x years or similar that are only for women.
And my 2c to politics: I don't think abortion is an edge case as it ties into a greater freedom of reproductive choice for women that make up half the US population before we even get started on how this affects their partners and families. Obama is not incorrect in saying that this is an economic and also crucial issue, as even everyday things like easy access to birth control (one less stressor for me and my partner! thank you!) are being assaulted by the super far extremist right. How serious they are shall remain to be seen (and on a state level it seems pretty serious), but as a woman I am scared shitless by the idea that a presidential candidate is included in that group of people.
This is not to say that SOPA and many, many other issues aren't also important, but absolute single-issue voting doesn't help anyone in any regard because there are plenty of non-tested, extremist, and pointlessly single minded people that support SOPA. There just is no such thing as a candidate that represents everything I care about the way I want, so I choose the one that I feel will do the least damage across more issues.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/pregnanc...
I can think of a number of negative impacts - for example I would imagine that being pregnant with a rapist's baby might cause any number of psychological (and even physiological) issues that might make concentration and work difficult. Pregnancy itself results an a number of discomforts including bloating, hemorrhoids, bleeding, nausea, and back pain that might make work difficult.
And that doesn't take into account pregnancy complications like eclampsia.
I'm worried that we've managed to conflate "Vote out the SOAP folks for being clearly wrong on this" with "Vote in the pro-lifers". I don't think that's a fair interpretation of the issue.
edit: Changed nutjobs reference to something more reasonable.