Abortion isn't a global problem, it's a local problem. The citizens of Africa aren't victimized because Texas bans abortion.

The citizens of Africa are victimized when Texas subsidizes oil production.

I'm not a fan of a world government, but a mechanism for dealing with the problems of sharing resources and dealing with free riders and the race to the bottom would be appreciated.

  what would be the global policy on abortion? 

Probably none. I agree with the author that we need world government, but it would be stupid to have the highest level of government stipulate all laws for every nation, state, province, county, town and village beneath it.

One could say that about the Americans but they do it almost compulsively, and completely ignore levels of government where nearly everything actually happens. Many current American problems are locally managed including housing and real estate but so much energy goes to the President, partly because he -pertains to- so many people. Many people are explicit that whatever is on their minds must be done “nationally”. What’s to stop this pattern from repeating at a greater scale?

  What’s to stop this pattern from repeating at a greater scale?

A well-designed constitution would be a start.

Not that there is an air-tight guarantee that a government won't turn bad. But we currently have over a half dozen governments with nuclear weapons. On the whole, I'd rather just worry about one.

One you can’t leave

Yes, that's the proposition: potential bad government instead of potential extinction.

No thanks. Easy. Bad government is a predictable outcome. Extinction risk is wildly overrated and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

I'd be uncomfortable emphatically staking a position on the whether a global government would go bad. There are many factors aside from ideology that determine if a government functions well; if someone tells me "I'm forming a new liberal democracy" it is too little information to predict if it will be a good one, or a bad one.

People do overestimate the risk that a nuclear war would lead to human extinction. Unfortunately, people also overestimate, gravely, the capacity of humanity to refrain from nuclear war. It has been less than a century since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we've come close to a nuclear conflict on several occasions.

“I’m forming a new government, and everyone is subject to it and you can’t leave,” is a heavy enough ask for me to take my chances and oppose it. It’s also not clear to me how you plan to bring the nuclear powers in question to heel without some sort of a war.

I assumed it was understood that entry of any country into a world government would be decided by a referendum. In normal times, most people see the benefit in cooperation. If it is impossible to imagine the people of a nation voting to join a world government, that is because we are living in strange times.

The reason we have to force states into the 21st century is because they are holding the cities hostage. Local government only works if you keep going all the way down.

If Austin can't make abortion legal, Texas can't make it illegal.

> what would be the global policy on abortion?

The U.N. Human Rights Committee has a recent (2019) publication[1], "General comment no. 36, Article 6 (Right to Life)" that contains an entry that is relevant to this question.

Page two, item eight under "General Remarks":

"Although States parties may adopt measures designed to regulate voluntary termination of pregnancy, those measures must not result in violation of the right to life of a pregnant woman or girl, or her other rights under the Covenant. Thus, restrictions on the ability of women or girls to seek abortion must not, inter alia, jeopardize their lives, subject them to physical or mental pain or suffering that violates article 7 of the Covenant, discriminate against them or arbitrarily interfere with their privacy. States parties must provide safe, legal and effective access to abortion where the life and health of the pregnant woman or girl is at risk, or where carrying a pregnancy to term would cause the pregnant woman or girl substantial pain or suffering, most notably where the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest or where the pregnancy is not viable. In addition, States parties may not regulate pregnancy or abortion in all other cases in a manner that runs contrary to their duty to ensure that women and girls do not have to resort to unsafe abortions, and they should revise their abortion laws accordingly. For example, they should not take measures such as criminalizing pregnancy of unmarried women or applying criminal sanctions to women and girls who undergo abortion or to medical service providers who assist them in doing so, since taking such measures compels women and girls to resort to unsafe abortion. States parties should remove existing barriers to effective access by women and girls to safe and legal abortion, including barriers caused as a result of the exercise of conscientious objection by individual medical providers, and should not introduce new barriers. States parties should also effectively protect the lives of women and girls against the mental and physical health risks associated with unsafe abortions. In particular, they should ensure access for women and men, and especially girls and boys, to quality and evidence-based information and education on sexual and reproductive health and to a wide range of affordable contraceptive methods, and prevent the stigmatization of women and girls who seek abortion. States parties should ensure the availability of, and effective access to, quality prenatal and post-abortion health care for women and girls, in all circumstances and on a confidential basis."

[1] - https://www.refworld.org/docid/5e5e75e04.html

So Poland and US restrictions are blatantly against the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That's a fun fact to know.

Poland is not exactly a doing well at the moment!

Abortion should be a human right. All countries that don’t respect that should pay huge fines. Thanks for giving that example.

Counterpoint: Abortion is murder. All countries that don’t respect that should pay huge fines.

See how silly you’re being? The parent comment already shared that large parts of the world have different values.

I’d be curious of your take when your proposed value isn’t chosen and there is no recourse.

In no other case is a human being, living or dead, legally required to give up their organs, bodily fluids, or other part of themselves, nor to literally risk their lives, for another human being.

Corpses have more bodily autonomy than women after Dobbs.

I do not understand your comment.

> In no other case is a human being, living or dead, legally required to give up their organs, bodily fluids, or other part of themselves, nor to literally risk their lives, for another human being.

In many other cases are humans legally required to literally risk their lives for another human being. Would you like me to give you examples?

> Corpses have more bodily autonomy than women after Dobbs.

I guess this is something US specific?

You have not addressed anything in the comment you're replying to. I think the right to abortion is the less bad of the two options, but I can also understand the people who say that abortion is murder. Can't you?

If abortion is murder, then is refusing to donate your kidney when someone else needs it to live also murder?

Is refusing to donate blood, bone marrow, etc, murder?

Is not mandating the donation of viable organs after death murder?

None of these things are required of people, in the name of bodily autonomy. None of these inactions are considered murder. And yet you expect women to donate their bodies for 9 months to something that is not yet a person, and take the very, very real risk of injury, permanent disability, or death, and the near-certainty that their bodies will never be the same again, to support what you call a human life.

The logic does not follow. It does not matter whether life begins at conception, at first heartbeat, at differentiated brain development, or at birth: In no case other than pregnancy is a human being societally expected or legally required to give even a part of their body to keep another human being alive, regardless of how safe the procedure may be.

Abortion is action/active/doing harm. Refusing to donate is inaction/passive/allowing harm. The distinction is significant, search 'passive vs active killing'. There is also more structural / 'algorithmic' solution for it in St. Aquinas' Double Effect Principle. Hint: doing harm is never moral.

Positive and negative rights are different. There is a negative right to life, there is no positive right to life. Ergo, you are forbidden from actions that cause somebody's death in general and you are not compelled to actions that prevent somebody's death in general. Existence of a negative rights does not imply a corresponding positive right.

Give this man a cigar!

I disagree. There’s actually lots of cases. One simpler example: https://ktenaslaw.com/forced-blood-draw/

And in the inverse, a few months ago I saw a lot users here arguing in favor of forcing Covid vaccinations against the person’s will to protect immunocompromised. Where do you stand on that?

Many don’t believe this is a human right, and you enforcing this on them is going against their will. This is authoritarian.

Authoritarian is forcing a mother to have a child she doesn’t want! It’s her body! If you force your opinion on something that should be exclusively her concern then you are the “authoritarian”

I think the argument is that there is effectively zero difference in a 39 week old fetus and a newborn baby, so that argument only works if you're willing to extend the logic to getting rid of a newborn to...OR we acknowledge that there has to be a cutoff somewhere in the pregnancy where abortions are no longer acceptable.

Otherwise, we're pretending sentience is magically conveyed as the baby passes through the birth canal, which is silly.

> Otherwise, we're pretending sentience is magically conveyed as the baby passes through the birth canal, which is silly.

You're right, that is silly. It is a silly, misleading straw-man argument.

Sentience isn't and never was the test. People in long-term comas still have rights.

Also, it's hard to define precisely, harder to test in new-born infants, who are not all that "wired up" anyway at the time of birth.

So at what point should we no longer be ok with ending the life of the developing human? 39 weeks? 24 weeks? 16 weeks? Somewhere else?

At what point do you stop reducing issues to misleading "trick questions"?

It's not a trick question, it's a recognition that abortion support is rarely binary. The majority of people (even pro-choice) believe there is a point in the pregnancy where an elective abortion would be grotesque and shouldn't be allowed. What drives the divide in the debate is where we should draw that line. Conception? Viability? Birth?

It's the fundamental point in the debate, so it's far from a trick question?

a) You're moving the goalposts by inserting the word "elective" that was not there before.

b) As Mr Buttigieg said, ""If it's that late in your pregnancy, then almost by definition, you've been expecting to carry it to term" - engage with that instead of repeating yourself?

c) As the other commenter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31892643) says, this is a nonsense hypothetical

> One singular example of an abortion at 39 weeks where the mother didn't want the baby. I guarantee you can't actually find one even though you claim it exists

> It's the fundamental point in the debate

It is not, or should not be.

> believe there is a point ... shouldn't be allowed.

Again, should be a medical decision between patient and doctor, not a legal one, and not a numeric comparison.

Dr Kermit Gosnell performed a number of elective abortions that late in term, and we only know about those because he was dumb enough to get caught killing a few after delivery.

See this is the trick, the sleight-of hand - is draws you into arguing about unsubstantiated, viscerally affecting irrelevancies and hopes that you won't notice that this diverts from the substance.

The mother decided to have unprotected sex. There’s a reason women get pregnant. This isn’t some magical thing that is forced on women. Cause and effect.

The body inside her body is not hers. Unfortunately biology does not conform to our fantasyland.

Forcing those who are against this to pay a fine is against their will.

This is such bulshit! First and foremost willing unprotected sex is not the only reason for getting pregnant! Contraceptive are not 100% effective and there is rape. Second the body inside her might not belong to her (although… debatable) but her body is still hers and therefore she is entitled to remove anything inside of her. Third sometimes there are medical reasons for abortions (Malta recently almost killed a mother that had a miscarriage… the child was 100% going to die but as long as the fetus’ heart was beating they could not remove it and therefore the mover risked sepsis)

A twisted example based on your comment: should be allowed to remove tumours? They have a slightly different DNA from the host therefore they are not “property” of the sick and therefore should be left there!

> This is such bulshit!

I know, a different opinion on a left wing dominant forum. It’s pretty wild.

> First and foremost willing unprotected sex is not the only reason for getting pregnant! Contraceptive are not 100% effective and there is rape.

I address this in another comment below.

> Third sometimes there are medical reasons for abortions (Malta recently almost killed a mother that had a miscarriage… the child was 100% going to die but as long as the fetus’ heart was beating they could not remove it and therefore the mover risked sepsis)

You’re citing very rare events to support the main issue which is the majority of abortions are out of convenience, which is where the main issue is.

For these rare events there can be middle ground found here.

> Second the body inside her might not belong to her (although… debatable) but her body is still hers and therefore she is entitled to remove anything inside of her. > A twisted example based on your comment: should be allowed to remove tumours? They have a slightly different DNA from the host therefore they are not “property” of the sick and therefore should be left there!

This is arguing the same point in my opinion. The tumor does not grow into a human. The tumor is not able to survive outside of the womb in a NICU as a human.

It was bulshit not because it was a different opinion but because it was a very poor argument! An embryo is incapable of surviving outside of the womb! A fetus might if it’s old enough! Nobody anywhere perform abortions at a stage where the fetus could survive without the mother in an nicu!

An embryo I agree cannot survive out of the womb, but what an embryo is, is a stage of human life. It’s still a human. Let’s not start trying to decide who is human enough to live.

In Colorado you can get an abortion up to 9 months. There’s legislation trying to pass abortion allowance up to the moment of birth, and some have been recently successful in passing. Many states in the US allow abortions in 2nd trimester which is where a baby can survive outside the womb in a NICU.

> Let’s not start trying to decide who is human enough to live.

But you are already doing that stating that abortion should be illegal altogether! You just set the threshold very early on!

That makes no sense.

My understanding of the pro life view is that if someone chooses to put sperm in there, they are agreeing to give up some bodily autonomy and carry the child to birth.

> The mother decided to have unprotected sex

Or she was raped, or nobody taught her anything but religious abstinence bullshit and she didn't even know the ramifications.

> The body inside her body is not hers

So if you take that "body" inside her out of her, what happens to it? It dies unless it's the late stages (what, 6 months in?) It's entirely dependent on her to grow to become a human being.

You should stop bringing rape or incest on this subject, it’s not useful to the cause.

Abortion should be a a right regardless of the reasons. It’s not more of a right because the woman was raped. In both cases, they don’t want a thing growing in their uterus, no matter their reasons.

The real problem is, in my opinion: should we force a human to maintain another human against their will? What if we could extract the fetus and grow it in vitro instead of aborting it? In the same vein, does a parent legally have to be an organ donor for their child?

These are questions we can answer and debate on even if we disagree on whether a fetus is alive or not.

Rape is less than 2% of abortions. Even then, because my father was a horrible person I shouldn’t have to die for it. We don’t need to use rare edge cases to validate the 98% of abortions which are out of convenience.

I’m not talking about abstinence, plenty of birth control options are available. Men need to take more responsibility and wear a condom.

> So if you take that "body" inside her out of her, what happens to it? It dies unless it's the late stages (what, 6 months in?) It's entirely dependent on her to grow to become a human being.

Yes this is biology, and? If you ever had to visit a NICU you’ll see plenty of 20 some week old pre-mature babies (or “bodies” in your case) that are just as human as you and I. They are just in a different stage in life. They need food to survive, just like you and I. I have a 1 year old, he is dependent on me to grow and survive.

No method is 100% safe - and we are talking about something that happens multiple times for most people, it will fail due to pure statistics.

> Authoritarian is forcing a mother to have a child she doesn’t want! It’s her body!

And many pro-life folks say that you're killing a child. It's his/her body.

We don't allow parents to to kill 'inconvenient' child post-birth† so according to their argument neither should we pre-birth.

† Well:

* https://www.government.nl/topics/euthanasia/euthanasia-and-n...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After-birth_abortion

* https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2017/07/13/should-one-be-allo...

It’s not yet a child when you perform an abortion!

> It’s not yet a child when you perform an abortion!

Just to be clear: are we talking about the pre-birth situation or the post-birth situation (as practice in the Netherlands)?

If they are born it’s not an abortion anymore! Although I do support euthanasia… had I had some serious defect I wish my parents had the decency to kill me early on or have an abortion.

When does the fetus become a child?

what about the childs body?

An embryo is not a human

> An embryo is not a human

So a human female and a human male copulate and they conceive something not-human? What species is it if it is not Homo sapiens? If it is not Homo sapiens, why does it apparently have human DNA (distinct from either the female and male that were involved)?

Why is it that when two humans copulate, they produce something not-human, but when every other mammal pairs copulate they produce something of the same species?

In your opinion when does it go from being not-human to being human? Is is gradual, on a spectrum? Or is it binary: at a certain point in development there is some characteristic that becomes present

Judaism, as an example, does not consider the embryo to be human, but instead to be 'potential human', and doesn't consider it human or ensouled until it is birthed. A large number of people who believe abortion is murder do so because they are Christian, a religion that spawned from Judaism, yet they don't even understand their Old Testament as well as the Jews do.

En embryo might eventually become a human but is not one yet! You need a decently developer brain at least… being a small agglomeration of cells with human dna doesn’t make you a human! A tumor is an agglomeration of cells with human dna but is not treated as a person! On general is a gradual process… but like with every fuzzy system it is easy in some case to say if something belongs ta a category or not but when you reach the overlap of categories to becomes harder. Just set the threshold when it is still clear

It's not her body since conception. It's another human's body inside her body.

I personally don't think we should have governments protecting lives or rights or anyone - therefore if abortion happens that's unfortunate but I wouldn't spend resources chasing that.

That said abortion is obviously murder and immoral, no matter how convenient it can be.

> abortion is obviously murder and immoral

No, it’s not « obvious ». Many disagree on that, that’s kind of the whole point of the current debate.

That you claim 'abortion is obviously murder' shows you don't even understand the position of those who claim it isn't. Go do more research on the side you don't hold.

An embryo is not a human (and I say so as a father and former embryo myself) so it is not murder!

An embryo is a stage of being a human. As you say, you were an embryo yourself. It's only because we can't see it that we feel it's not human enough and can be killed. The thought of not being "human enough" doesn't bode well in our history, especially around the 1940s timeframe.

A spermatozoon is a stage of being human… so is an “egg cell” but nobody is forcing people to allow them all to develop into humans! And no… the nazi example has nothing to do with it (and I say it as a person whom all grandparents got sent to concentration camps by nazis)

This argument at its core is trying to justify at what stage of development this is considered human enough to protect. I think it’s a similar line of thinking as eugenics.

It is not… is actually a completely different thing! Check the dictionary!

Against their will to do what? Legalizing abortion doesn't mean forced abortions.

> Legalizing abortion doesn't mean forced abortions.

Legalizing slavery doesn't mean you're forced to own slaves.

Some folks believe certain actions are intrinsically immoral and no one should be allowed to do them.

It is authoritarian to tell people, it is authoritarian to tell women, they do not own their body?

But yes, the basic problem remains, humanity remains divided on very basic things. And enforcing unity would be ugly.

You are entitled to that opinion as others are to the very huge gray intermediates AND the total opposite. Why not?

This is why one world government will happen at the barrel of a gun, if ever.

It will happen through a global catastrophe where the emerging authority plays the savior of the human race.

What causes you to think that is how it will happen?

Based on my limited knowledge of the history of societies, an external threat, perceived by ordinary people to acutely and in actuality threaten their livelihoods, is historically a common driver of major change in societal power dynamics.

The rise (those damn Christians!) and fall (those damn Goths and Huns!) of Rome, the fall of Napoleon’s rule (those damn Russians!), the rise of Hitler (those damn Jews!), USA after Pearl Harbor (those damn Japanese!), downfall of Germany in 1945 (this damn war!), end of the Japanese imperial era (those damn bombs!) and the subsequent Americanization of Japan, fall of Great Britain’s monarchy after the war (those damn royalty!), the late 60’s major loss of civil liberties in the US (those damn blacks!), the entire Gaddafi affair (those damn clan monarchs / those damn Yankees!), USA becoming a surveillance state after 9/11 (those damn terrorists!), rise of the Taliban (those damn Yankees again!) …

Until when? I advocate parental "take backs" up til the kid's 18, but some think I'm a bit extreme.

I don't think forcing my opinion on anyone who disagrees is correct, but then neither do I want others' opinions forced on me.

Pay fines to who?

What about the human rights of the unborn babies?

Legally they aren't humans, and hence have no rights, until birth.

"Human" isn't a legal term, and it pre-dates modern laws entirely. It simply refers to a member of the homo species.

And who determines whether or not the unborn have rights? Rights are given by god, not some legislature.

> Rights are given by god

Whose god? Allah? Buddha?

No, rights are natural, books with legends and stories have nothing to do with it, but their legal framework is provided by legislatures.