> Karina Marolla, a 49-year-old opponent of the law, said: “What was voted for today is the death penalty for the most innocent. Today in Argentina there’s no law giving the death penalty to rapists or murderers. So we’re feeling sad, to put it lightly.”

It's buried toward the bottom, but I'm genuinely surprised that opponents got the appearance of a fair shake in The Guardian.

I'm really happy for all Argentinean women, including my two little daughters, this law makes Argentina a freer (better) country.

This is just an oportunistic political move ahead of next year's elections. The government doesn't really care about abortion. Source: Argentinian living in Argentina.

If the outcome is net-positive, does it matter because of which reasons it was achieved?

Well, it depends how do you measure positivizes. The babies that are going to be aborted, for sure don't see it as positive.

"Net positive" means here that despite negative effects, the end result is still preferable to other outcomes.

(While not quite applicable here,) the easiest example to explain this is when the pregnancy threatens the lives of both mother-to-be and unborn child. An abortion will end the life of the child but the mother gets to live. In the other case both mother and child would die. So an abortion would be "net positive" because only the child dies and not both of them.

But that was already legal in Argentina. Here what they voted is abortion because I want it and that´s it.

The example was meant to make clear what "net positive" means. Do you actually believe that women get abortions because "they want them"? That there are no real reasons? Not because untimely offspring might throw them and their family into poverty again? Not because the partner might be unsuitable for raising children and they would be left on their own with them in short order?

This is strawmanning.

No one who advocates for life believes that there aren't any mitigating circumstances.

People who advocate for life believe that there aren't any mitigating circumstances that justify murder.

Still a lot of countries which are not blue:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Abortion...

Which are also countries where overpopulation and destitution are most prevalent. Improving access to education, contraception, and abortion for women worldwide should be our #1 foreign aid objective. We should target this in place of food aid.

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell. Nothing good is going to come of that, regardless of how right you are or how strongly you feel.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Allowing discussion of a divisive issue, while suppressing opposing views, is not a neutral moderation approach.

The original post is itself flamebait and is not HN-worthy.

Users took care of the article by flagging it.

Your comment stood out in a bad way. When X is an inflammatory topic, entering with "$X is evil" is just exploding a bomb. That's not ok here.

Other people doing bad things is no excuse for you doing them. That's a recipe for a downward spiral.

That reference is distorted, in any case. "$foo is evil" is a trope of standard internet hyperbole, that gets applied to things ironically. That is not at all the same thing as what you posted.

I don't mean to suggest that a bad action justifies another bad action. I mean to suggest that making a value judgment (directed against a thing, not against a person) is not a bad action. It's a normal part of discourse. Offense is in the eye of the beholder.

Your point is taken, though. I'll watch it.

If you want to hear an opinion that argues not from a moral standpoint but takes the view of someone who actually has to make such a decision, I can recommend listening to the very concise (< 2min) and thoughtful argument Pete Buttigieg makes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKOoWYfIzIw

Buttigieg's argument supposes that the question is if the government dictates the outcome or the woman does. It's true that at the end of the day someone is going to decide if a pregnancy is carried to term or not but Buttigieg is sweeping so much under the rug in a rush to get to a question that he feels comfortable with. He's avoiding things like:

Is abortion a good thing or not? Should the government (and by extension people who don't support it) be paying for it? Should the government treat it as neutral - there are a raft of instances where we let people make decisions but we absolutely let government push a desired outcome. Don't smoke. Get exercise. Have kids. Get married. Don't be a bigot. Be patriotic.

The annoying thing to me is that virtually everyone agrees that there's a space short of government dictating that abortions don't happen and not caring at all if they happen. Whne B. Clinton said "Safe, Legal and Rare" the question that people should have asked is "Why rare?" and "How do you want to make it rare?"

I don't.

I approach moral decisions from moral principles. Letting your emotions run you is a recipe for disaster and a mark of immaturity.

I just wanted you to know that I share your sentiment mostly, and that you are not alone in your opinion on this on HN.

When is a life, a life? I was born very prematurely, as far as those things went back then. How can someone claim to be moral, yet be in favour of legalized murder of those babies in similar situations today?

Certainly I do not think that the fetus is a person or a life (whatever that means) at four weeks, nor at conception. At best, abortion could be a necessary evil to save the life of the mother at later stages of the pregnancy.