> Activists also use virtual private networks, which can minimize data collected about browsing, and encourage Polish women to contact them on encrypted channels like Signal. They delete all online conversations after the person has had the abortion and caution the person not to post on social media about their experiences, after some faced online harassment. One organization that provides funds for Polish people to get the procedure in Germany pays abortion clinics directly, rather than providing funds to patients, to ensure there are no digital records.
I don't understand why this paragraph is buried in the middle of the article. It should be a prominently featured tooltip.
Umm, yes? Prosecutors have been using search history and text messages as evidence for a long time. If you're in a jurisdiction where abortions are illegal, there's no reason to think they wouldn't also be used as evidence.
>they violated our basic rights as Women by suddenly overturning a law with no warning or input from citizens.
This statement is kind of funny when the right you're referring to was invented (right or wrong) by a group of unelected judges, and is now open to be legislated on by the citizens you want input from.
>This statement is kind of funny when the right you're referring to was invented (right or wrong) by a group of unelected judges, and is now open to be legislated on by the citizens you want input from.
No.
Humans (and that includes women) have agency. That includes bodily autonomy and any "law" that restricts that is unethical, misogynistic and flat wrong.
Don't like abortion? Don't have one. As far as anyone else is concerned it's none of your concern.
While I am a huge fan of abortion (it has killed so many future criminals that you can see its implementation in the crime stats), this idea of agency as justification for allowing abortion is completely wrong because we already curtail agency for various things like self harm and harming others and at some point long past inception but before birth it gets pretty hard to argue you aren't harming someone else.
If that's what you believe, then you should have no problem being required, under penalty of imprisonment or execution to:
1. Submit blood/dna samples to a state organ donor program;
2. Give up a kidney, a lung, part of your liver, perhaps a testicle to someone who is a good donor match.
What you're advocating is essentially the same thing.
What's that? You don't want to be required to do so?
Why is that?
As an aside, according to the Donor Care Network[0]:
"Kidney donor surgery has a .007% mortality rate, which means that on average, for every 100,000 living donor surgeries, seven donors die."
At the same time, according to the CDC[1]:
"In 2020, 861 women were identified as having died of maternal causes in the United States, compared with 754 in 2019 (3). The maternal mortality rate for 2020 was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births"
Making it more than three times as dangerous for a woman to carry a child to term than it is to donate a kidney.
Would you support legislation that would require you to provide a kidney, part of your liver, a lung or some other organ to another person? And if you refuse, you will be subject to imprisonment or even the death penalty if the designated recipient died?
If not, then why is it okay to have laws that require essentially the same thing from women with functioning reproductive systems, with the additional burden of such a requirement entailing more than three times the risk of death than donating a kidney?
Well, now you're just confusing positive and negative rights. The curtailment of agency that we have a long history of is to enforce negative rights (I.e you do not have the right to kill someone) or to protect you from yourself if there is strong evidence you are not of sound mind (i.e. inpatient psychiatric care and that is really a negative right as well because we are stopping the crazy person in front of us from harming the potentially sane person underneath that has been overcome by crazy). Your examples are all of the form this person has X problem therefore I can be compelled to do Y, which is pretty clearly not allowed when you read the constitution.
In the case of an abortion the right to autonomy clashes with the right to not be murdered. And that is what has had a significant portion of the population so up in arms that they spent fifty years trying to get a supreme court that would overturn Roe because they correctly think that point is before birth. How much before birth is what needs to go through the sometimes ugly but often cathartic democratic process at the state level.
>Your examples are all of the form this person has X problem therefore I can be compelled to do Y, which is pretty clearly not allowed when you read the constitution.
Right. This (non)person (an embryo/fetus) has the problem that it cannot exist outside the womb for at least six months, therefore a woman can be compelled to literally give up her flesh and body for nine months -- against her will?
So. By your logic, if a person will die without your help, even if you don't know/like/want them around and you don't help them, you're a murderer.
That's what you seem to be claiming.
Does it sound absurd? It should, because it is. And that's what you're advocating.
No, I specifically said we need to go through the sometimes ugly but often cathartic legislative process to decide at what point before birth an abortion is a medical procedure and at what point it becomes a murder.
Also, talking about at what point a fetus can survive outside the womb is a non winning argument as well because it's shockingly early and getting earlier every year due to medical breakthroughs. You and I both won't like where the legal limit on abortion ends up by that metric.
No, you are a murderer if you choose to kill someone and act on your choice. You keep trying to put words in my mouth that I did not say because you have talking points for those words whereas you don't seem to have talking points for what I actually said.
Also I am really not sure if you have any comprehension or experience of the actual pregnancy process because you keep couching it in terms of you actively helping someone when that really isn't the case (you get better results if the mother is helping but it isn't required). As long as you keep doing the basic things that were keeping you alive before pregnancy 9 months later it is highly likely a kid will be born, especially as the pregnancy progresses further along into the later months where most people have the most problem with abortion. The active choice in a pregnancy is to terminate it or not, the rest of it can be surprisingly passive and still work (although if you choose to not terminate it and also choose to be passive you are a terrible person, which is unfortunate but not illegal).
>No, I specifically said we need to go through the sometimes ugly but often cathartic legislative process to decide at what point before birth an abortion is a medical procedure and at what point it becomes a murder.
And I disagree. What other people do witht their bodies is none of your (or anyone else's) business.
Anything else is just being a a busybody.
Edit: To clarify, bodily autonomy is an individual right which shouldn't be limited or proscribed by any government, local, state or federal.
What law? I thought it was judicial decision that was overturned for a reason. If the populace wanted a law they have had years to do it. Should blame the voters and not the court for failing to vote people who would vote for such a law.
They don't really make sense to use. If a woman googles Alabama abortion and finds out that she can't get one, but can in some other state, she isn't violating the law, she is doing research.
That can be easily extended to anything you search. I have searched how to make a bomb on the internet. Should that put me on some list? Of course not. The mass surveillance was implemented by borderline senile old and fearful people that easily get overextended when it comes to modern communication. None of this security theatre has made anyone safer, on the contrary the constant suspicion slowly decreases trust and will have the opposite effect in the long run.
In 1966 Ceausescu, Romania’s dictator, wanted to increase the country’s population by banning abortions and birth control. This is the result of that policy:
The intent behind banning abortion in the US has nothing to do with influencing population growth; it's purely about punishing women for daring to try to assert control of their own bodies.
That's what I was taught in Catholic school as well, and yet, none of the people telling my classmates and I that abortion was literally murder seemed to be in favor of equal criminal penalties for premeditated murder and performing an abortion, because it's quite obviously not equal to killing a living human. Likewise, the fact that there are plenty of people who are only in favor of abortion in cases like when the mother's life is at stake are tacitly admitting that a fetus is not equivalent to a living human; essentially no one would be in favor of harvesting organs from a living child to keep a parent alive.
If the argument is that a fetus is not equal to a human but still life and therefore sacred, then why isn't the anti-abortion crowd clamoring to make putting terminally ill pets to sleep a crime? If euthanizing an actual living dog or cat that can feel pain is morally okay, I don't really understand why an unviable fetus would require more protection under the law. I've also not met anyone who also wants to outlaw hunting because "life is sacred"; instead, I'll often hear arguments about how hunting is ethical despite the fact that it's ending life.
If the arguments that abortion should be illegal because of the "sanctity of life" were being applied consistently to other issues, I'd find it easier to believe. When the only heavy political mobilization from the "life is sacred" interest group is to protect "life" when it's sequestered inside a woman's body, it's pretty hard not to assume that the only substantive difference is in fact the motivation.
The baby had the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck[?]. Stillbirth is not a crime. Sure, there is evidence she was considering an abortion, but I see no evidence mentioned that she followed through on the purchase. Given that the facts are consistent with a naturally failed birth, which occur quite frequently, claims of infanticide are unwarranted.
This is a major fear of "pro life" legislation: women are reduced to birthing vessels and failure to reproduce warrants intense legal scrutiny. I have friends that could, in today's legal environment, be facing life in prison because they've had three or more miscarriages.
[?] I may have misread something, and cannot find a source on this on second reading. Leaving it in place for the sake of transparency.
> but I see no evidence mentioned that she followed through on the purchase
This article is about abortion rights. I think it's fair game to call a 35 week abortion what it is.
> women are reduced to birthing vessels
There isn't some conspiracy to turn women into birthing vessels. The only thing under debate is at what age a baby becomes a legal person afforded rights to life and at what age a women loses her right to end that life.
In many states the more accurate debate is at what point does the possibility of a not-yet guaranteed air-breathing human have more rights than the already living human it's still developing in. Or put another way, at what point do we decide that the woman's life belongs to the state?
These new laws make it clear that a pregnant female, who is already a participating member of humanity, has only one purpose. To carry out the pregnancy, even if it is high risk and likely to kill or disable her. If she fails to produce a new living member, she may now go to jail in some states because the quiet-bad-faith part is made into law; that her Life, is not nearly as important to them as possibility of the not-yet guaranteed new young human. There is nothing pro-life about that.
Oh please. Cool it with the strawman arguments. It's boring.
They aren't owned by the state. They simply can't kill the human growing inside them. That's it, that's all it is.
We don't need to drop to analogies and hyperbole, we have the language to describe what is happening. A woman, in most instances, chooses to have a baby grow inside of them. But regardless of how it got there, at a certain point that baby deserves human rights.
That point is all that's up for debate. At what point does a baby become a human with rights to life.
One side argues birth, one side argues conception. The vast majority decided viability 22 weeks (disturbing imo but neither here nor there).
My human right to free speech stops at the point it harms someone else.
I don't see why these rights would be any bloody different.
If you want to debate this issue you need to be willing to define when a baby becomes a human, because THAT is the only thing being debated here.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly lately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
In particular, please edit out flamewar swipes like your first sentence here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Can you link to one? I can find articles calling it a still birth, which is obviously the contention of those who think she's innocent, but I can't find any articles talking about the cord being wrapped. Also, the initial medical examination of the body said it died of asphyxiation, determined by a "float test" which evidently showed air in the lungs. It seems this conclusion may likely have been erroneous and the float test not scientifically sound, but it seems a bit unlikely they would initially conclude such a thing if the cord were obviously wrapped around the neck.
> The baby had the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck. Stillbirth
Do you have another source which is saying that? This article says:
> Paramedics arrived at Latice Fisher’s Mississippi home to find a baby in the toilet, lifeless and blue, the umbilical cord still attached. The child — roughly six pounds and more than 35 weeks along — was rushed to the hospital, where it was pronounced dead.
> Fisher, a mother of three, told paramedics she had not known she was pregnant. But she later admitted to a nurse that she had known about the pregnancy. And after she voluntarily surrendered her iPhone to police, investigators discovered that Fisher, a former police dispatcher, had searched for how to “buy Misopristol Abortion Pill Online” 10 days earlier.
It may have been a case of the woman earnestly not knowing she was pregnant for months (don't laugh, this happens with very obese women) and thinking she had just recently gotten pregnant. But it doesn't say anything about a nuchal chord.
Babies are born prematurely at 35 weeks and earlier. My mother survived being born at 33 weeks. There is no doubt we're talking about a human individual at this point.
I sincerely hope that American abortion activists and supporters will reconsider the ethics of late-term abortion. It's barbaric. I think most people just haven't done the research / internalized the cruelty.
'Serious' is a subjective qualifier that is doing a lot of work in your comment. But yes, I have met quite a few people who believe abortion should be flat legal, no qualifications or conditions. A lot of rhetoric about fetuses being parasites. From a few I've even heard "In my religion, it's not a person until it breaths."
"In 2015, almost two thirds (65.4%) of abortions were performed at ≤8 weeks’ gestation, and nearly all (91.1%) were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation. Few abortions were performed between 14 and 20 weeks’ gestation (7.6%) or at ≥21 weeks’ gestation (1.3%). During 2006–2015 the percentage of all abortions performed at >13 weeks’ gestation remained consistently low (≤9.0%). Among abortions performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation, a shift occurred toward earlier gestational ages, with the percentage performed at ≤6 weeks’ gestation increasing 11%."
That's ~91% of abortions at less than/equal to 13 weeks.
What's more:
"[T]he abortion rate for 2015 was 11.8 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years, and the abortion ratio was 188 abortions per 1,000 live births."
There were 638,169 total abortions, with only 9% (~57,500) occurring after 13 weeks.
Consider that this includes fetuses with deadly/debilitating defects (including, but not limited to, Down's Syndrome, cystic fibrosis and spina bifida) as well as other issues that threaten the life of the mother, doom the fetus to a painful death after birth and/or condemn such a child to a lifetime of misery.
Many/most of those cannot be determined without an amniocentesis[1], which isn't performed until 14-20 weeks.
It's not clear how many >13 week abortions are performed in those cases, but it's likely that a significant portion are fetuses that will likely die before/soon after birth, have debilitating defects and/or threaten the life of the mother.
As such, the truth is that the vast majority of abortions are performed long before a fetus is much more than the length of your middle finger.
So no. "Late-term" abortions are extremely rare, with only ~1.3% (~9,000 out of ~4.6 million pregnancies) performed after 21 weeks. And likely many (most?) are fetuses that have been found to have serious defects/abnormalities and/or a full term pregnancy threatens the life/health of the mother.
I'm not sure what you think "abortion activists" are advocating.
I'd say they're advocating giving women the opportunity to save their own lives and/or prevent enormous suffering among babies with debilitating/life-threatening conditions.
> I'd say they're advocating giving women the opportunity to save their own lives and/or prevent enormous suffering among babies with debilitating/life-threatening conditions.
Overturning Roe v Wade doesn't change anything related to these types of abortions. It only allows states to make up their own laws. Most of which won't change from what it is now and most of which only ban elective abortion.
>> We need a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women's rights.
Sounds great - but would that matter?
Roe vs. Wade showed that laws made and ‘democratic’ decisions settled upon in the USA can be reversed with no warning, no voting, nothing but funding from evil people.
I fail to believe these Christian extremists wouldn’t repeat the process with the constitution.
After all, these are people who take ‘wives be submissive to your husbands’ as literal Gospel.[0]
Absolutely disgusting and appalling.
That verse and many, many more - shows to me that Women’s rights or gay rights can never even be important to these people, sadly. In fact, as long as we have rights; they’ll fight against it. They think they have to, or they’ll go to hell!
God told them to take away our rights.
I mean, Christianity is a patriarchy, by design. (‘God the Father’ and all of that…)
Outside of Catholicism, there isn’t any sort of Divine Feminine figure, and the Bible doesn’t speak much upon Women’s rights. (having been raised by a Baptist Minister I do actually know quite a hit about the Bible)
It will be a constant uphill battle against these people, sadly.
[0] Check out this crockpot doozy of bullshit from Ephesians 5:21:
“ Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour.”
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. Religious flamewar is among the most tedious, nastiest, and most predictable.
We've had to ask you not to do flamewars on HN several times before. Fortunately it doesn't look like you've been making a habit of it recently–that's good!
There is a lot in your post that could be responded to, but, if I may, I'll talk about the most important.
There are a LOT of people who don't understand what "The Gospel" is. The Gospel is the bare minimum knowledge to be saved. Here goes:
God made us people to be in a relationship with Him
God is perfect
We are not perfect - and this imperfection prevents us from being with a perfect God
There is nothing we can do to be perfect, or to be with God
God sent Jesus to earth to die for us, so we don't have to die for our imperfections
If we accept Jesus' death for us, we can be in a perfect relationship with God -forever-
That is it. There is no mention of being gay, having abortions, murder, church, voting republican, loving others, believing in evolution, submitting to a husband, respecting a wife. Zilch. Nada.
I say this so that you might know what is the Gospel- and to know it is open to you, but also so that others might know what is the Gospel and what it isn't.
To be clear and relevant: Christians don't need to expel abortion to spread the gospel. And people who have had abortions can still receive the gospel. We can actually come together, while disagreeing about abortion.
Yes but you'll notice, only one side has to submit. Both sides have to love, but the power dynamic, and thus autonomy, is clearly not equal. For that matter, Paul also told slavemasters to treat their slaves well, and told slaves to obey their masters, which is exactly the dynamic he describes between men and women.
And then there's First Timothy...
"But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet. For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve. And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression. But women will be preserved through the bearing of children if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint."
I mean, you can insist these verses have been misinterpreted or misconstrued, and that because early Christianity had women in prominent positions obviously such views weren't universal, but it doesn't change the fact that women have been oppressed, and literally tortured and beaten to death over millennia because of them.
Yes, the ultimate power imbalance is still a big one. Having grown up in a Christian house that subscribed to this model, and having seen how that tends to play out, I’m no fan of it either. I’ve also seen churches divided over the issue of women in leadership roles, which is…I don’t even know how to begin to describe how bizarre that is to witness. In my later life I’ve become a Christian again but the inevitability of running into this line of thinking, as well as the homophobic “clobber verses” makes it very uncomfortable. So much of even the New Testament seems contradictory to the way Christ lived and taught, and that’s leaving aside the ugly influence of American conservatism on the Church.
God created us in His own image, and we decided to return the favor.
> Roe vs. Wade showed that laws made and ‘democratic’ decisions settled upon in the USA can be reversed with no warning, no voting, nothing but funding from evil people.
Roe vs. Wade wasn't a law, or really a democratic decision -- it's decision in the first place was pretty much an example of overturning those democratic decisions with no warning or voting (e.g. the texan laws that were placed by those democratically elected members of texan legislature).
EDIT: I’m a victim of rape, and my opinions expressed are largely from that of a woman who has been sexually assaulted.
Before you downvote me because you might disagree, or you might live in the USA and not like that I’m speaking negatively about it, please stop to put yourself in the shoes of the women in the USA, especially those who are victims of sexual assault.
Please be part of the solution, not the problem.
POST:
Looking from the outside in - America is, at best - a sad joke - and, at worst - absolutely appalling, horrific, and terrifying.
The response (rather the offensive as hell, disgusting, unbelievable lack of response) to the recent school shooting - followed by the abolition of basic human rights, less than a couple weeks later is a situation that has actually left me at a loss for words or understanding.
America has, finally - officially lost is right to call itself the ‘Land of the Free’.
The point where you’re arresting raped women for getting an abortion, yeah…pretty sure that’s just plain evil. No words.
It’s a terrifying situation, and I don’t see it getting any better anytime soon.
As a queer, transgender woman; I could not feel safer or more grateful to have made the choice to leave the USA and live here in Canada; where ‘freedom’ isn’t just a word shouted by homophobic, transphobic, gun-toting public as a reason to be hateful…but an honest-to-God way of life.
We all know that these awful people will be coming after gay marriage next.
I never thought I’d have to use the term ‘Christian extremists’, but what they’re doing to basic human rights is disturbing.
As a woman who considers herself a Christian - I’m pretty damn sure if God had a phone, he’d be placing a call to Biden to ask if they could take ‘In God we trust’ off the dollar bills.
It’s really sad how the USA can call Muslims terrorists, but ignore the terrorists within their borders. :(
> We all know they’re coming after gay marriage next.
Fortunately I think that will be harder to overturn, because it's on a less-shaky legal basis (as far as I know) compared to Roe v Wade. Also I think that ship has more or less sailed and society has basically come to accept it. Abortion has always been a lot more contentious.
> I never thought I’d have to use the term ‘Christian extremists’, but what they’re doing to basic human rights is disturbing.
This has been decades in the making, the endgame of an intergenerational propaganda campaign. They were extremists in the 80s, in the 00s, and today. What's interesting now is that the "Christian" angle is de-emphasized, and what used to be considered Christian fundamentalism has worked its way into mainstream secular conservativism (not by accident).
It is arguably a longstanding American political tradition to govern according to hypocritical authoritarian religious extremist principles, dating back to literally before the founding of the USA.
Thank you for a considerate, well-thought-out response.
I know people are downvoting me because they’re from the USA and they’re likely not ready for the truth.
They can choose to be ignorant. I can pretty much guarantee no woman I know would downvote that comment, it clearly comes from the place of male privilege that got us into this mess.
I chose to open up as a sexually assaulted woman, if they want to say my comment isn’t the plain-clothed truth, too bad for them.
They’ll see it eventually.
I completely agree it’s always been a problem - dating back to the Crusades and Witch-burnings..
I also sadly have to agree that it’s getting worse the more and more these extremist Christian views have become what the Right wing just..is, now.
There's this mindset that a significant part of HN readers subscribe to according to which emotions are bad in discourse and if you come out and say "I am personally affected by this, I am scared for my future and this is why", it's seen as a bad thing that doesn't satisfy "intellectual curiosity".
That's a really ridiculous take on what it means to be a human being participating in political discourse, but there it is. I'm quite appalled at the fact that your original comment was temporarily dead.
Of course, the same standard is somehow not applied when people are angry about mask mandates. Then it's apparently fine to be snarky, dismissive and outraged.
>They can choose to be ignorant. I can pretty much guarantee no woman I know would downvote that comment, it clearly comes from the place of male privilege that got us into this mess.
As an American male, I'm pretty appalled by this too. If men could get pregnant, abortion would have been legal as soon as (probably before) such procedures were safe to do. Which turns my stomach. A lot.
As I (and many folks I know) think, terminating a pregnancy is (or rather should be in the US) a personal, private decision to be made only by the pregnant person.
In fact, as I stated previously here[0], if you don't have a functional female reproductive system, you need to shut the fuck up.
And even if you do have one, if it's not you that's pregnant, you also need to shut the fuck up. It's not your business or concern.
I'm mad as hell about this even though it won't affect me personally. But as you describe, it gives the lie to the idea that this is a society based in liberty.
Thanks for sharing.
As an outsider (but frequent visitor with with close connections) I never felt the US deserved the moniker "land of the free" - it very much seems to be a place where any supposed freedom you might have to a live a peaceful and safe existence is so compromised by social attitudes and economic realities as to be effectively meaningless for a huge percentage of the population.
If Trump had actually succeeded in retaining power after the last election I wouldn't have been shocked, and it's not hard to believe things will continue to slide in that direction. I think it's still capable of digging itself out of the current hole, but it's hard to see the US being any sort of beacon of hope and light for the rest of the world anytime soon.
I don't understand why this paragraph is buried in the middle of the article. It should be a prominently featured tooltip.