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by aww_dang 1199 days ago
The framing is inflammatory. What most people can agree upon is that the surveillance state is out of control.

I'm sure I'll be flamed into oblivion here, but it is worth considering the headline from the perspective of the anti-abortionists. If we cannot empathize or attempt to understand those who disagree, what is the point of having a discussion?

"FB and Google hand over user data, help to prosecute baby killers"

Reasonable people can disagree on the topic of abortion or at what stage of pregnancy it is acceptable. HN is not the place where I want to have that discussion. It has already been explored at depth elsewhere.

3 comments

I've often been puzzled by why the abortion argument is seen as a binary. The majority of people in the developed world feel that the abortion legality line should be somewhere between conception and birth. Honestly, based on my somewhat biased sampling, there's probably a similar number of people who think infanticide should sometimes be legal as people who think a single fertilized egg has a right to life.
This is definitely a big part of the problem. Media outlets are looking for outrage. They need only conflate a ban on late term abortion with a blanket ban. For the other side, vice versa.
Think of it this way though: 50 years of legal precedent was overturned last year. Women who are young enough to get abortions have lived their entire lives not being considered murderers, legally. Abortion was an explicitly protected legal right. Now suddenly, a woman is transformed overnight from a citizen freely exercising their legal right into an illegal murderer — but of course only in certain localities. How are they supposed to deal with this massive U-turn? Can we not empathize with them?

It's one thing to make providing abortions illegal. It's quite another thing to prosecute the women.

Sounds opposite to what’s going on with pot in many states. Illegal for decades. Now legal. Massive U-turn.

Laws of the land change, like everything else in this world.

The crucial difference is that pot users don't suffer from the massive U-turn. Rather, they celebrate it. They're the ones who lobbied for the change.

Suddenly making people happy and freer is fine. Suddenly making them miserable and taking away their longstanding rights is another matter.

It's the same thing with women getting the right to vote in 1920. Women themselves wanted it and lobbied for it!

If you would have read the article to the end you would have noticed that is puts the blame on law enforcement and legislation.