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The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

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Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#81
post #76
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyway you cut it, all options being discussed or proposed puts the burden on women. I think this is the first issue to address. Contraception is for the woman to learn about, pay for and take, same for plan b, pregnancy tests and even abortions. Pregnancy costs are for the mother to pay, for the mother to learn what to do about it, how to handle. Raising a child is for the mother to do. Shame related to all this is…

That's all very reasonable and I agree with pretty much all of it, with the caveat that asking people participating in a society to give up some of their convenience in some situations is fairly routine, for both men and women. And also, as far as I'm aware, there is no state in the US in which mothers are absolutely forced to raise their offspring.

> asking people participating in a society to give up some of their convenience in some situations is fairly routine

Generally it's done with some sense of equality though. That's probably the issue here. If we all shared the burden of child birth and raising children equally, you'd have a much stronger case. Then when someone says we should ban abortion, everyone would feel the trade offs of doing so. If you don't have skin in the game, it seems disingenuous to argue for.

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why?

To be well informed of laws and their impact in communities much like your own

if someone came up to you on the street frothing at the mouth and ranting overemotionally, using buzzwords and -phrases to try to get your attention and work you up such that your emotional state matches their own, would you stop and listen to what facts they had to convey?

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#83
post #21

To repeat my comment on the earlier now-buried post: Companies definitely should disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant in cases where someone is being prosecuted for having an abortion. Obeying the law in this case is clearly immoral! This does not entail that obeying the law is always immoral, or even that breaking it is always moral. You can come to the conclusion that it is okay for com…

Why is all abortion law immoral? Why can't we draw a line somewhere before 28 weeks and say that if you want an abortion, you have to decide before 7 months have gone by? I can't imagine thinking that it should be legal to kill a full term fetus as it's being delivered solely because it hasn't been born yet.

First, as to the abortion question, I'm interested to hear what you think about https://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.h... (exegesis in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion).

As for "legal to kill a full term fetus as it's being delivered", of course that is not what is alleged to have happened in this case, and it is wrong, but most people who ever lived disagreed with me about this; as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide helpfully explains, "Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent. Infanticide continued to be common in most societies after the historical era began, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, ancient China, ancient Japan, Aboriginal Australia, Native Americans, and Native Alaskans."

However, surely even if you and I disagree on which acts are real crimes, we can agree that pervasive surveillance by Facebook aids in the prosecutions of many real crimes. But that is not enough to show that it is desirable; it also enables unjust government persecution of people who are doing things that are illegal, but should not be, and this must also be weighed in the balance. From my point of view it is evident that this is such a case. Perhaps your example would be something different: Christians being persecuted for holding worship services in their homes, for example, or the Righteous Among the Nations secretly protecting Jews in their houses during the Holocaust.

In short, totalitarianism is not transparently the best form of government, and for many of us this case illustrates the dangers to liberty from Facebook's pervasive surveillance.

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#84
post #75
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies definitely should disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant in cases where someone is being prosecuted for having an abortion. Obeying the law in this case is clearly immoral! I like living in a country where it's illegal to kill babies on a whim, thank you very much. So no, while you might disagree with this law, it's not at all "clear". > Of course talking about encryption always…

Probably many things are clear to me that are not clear to you. Some of them are things I'm wrong about. Others are things I know more about than you do. In yet other cases, the difference in perceptions stems from other causes. It sounds like abortion is in the second category. You might want to consider that the kind of inflammatory language you're using tends to make productive argument much less likely. > Faceboo…

> You might want to consider that the kind of inflammatory language you're using tends to make productive argument much less likely.

You might want to consider the same about statements like "the law is clearly immoral". I don't think my response was disproportionate.

> I think it is very unusual for employees to end up in jail because their corporate employer was found guilty of contempt of court.

Unusual, yes, but far from unthinkable; there simply aren't many cases where both sides fight to the bitter end, because the threat doesn't have to be carried out in order to have power. And of course if you can make someone unemployable then you don't need to jail them directly.

> We know about cases where companies have successfully refused to introduce cryptographic backdoors into their software

We do? When?

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#85
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really needed in this case. I was born with 7 months and didn't spend a night in hospital.

Quoted post unavailable.

Generally babies survive when born at 28 weeks. 24 weeks after LMP is 60%, 27 weeks is 89%, 31 weeks is 95%.

Absent any evidence of a specific diagnosis about the fetus, it's reasonable to assume this survival rate.

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#86
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, the aborted child is the main victim. In all likelihood, it was healthier than the average child born at 28 weeks, and most of those survive. Yes, there may be mitigating circumstances, and that should affect the severity of any punishment, but from the info I read here, it looks looks highly likely (1) these women are guilty, and because of that it IMO is good that the government tried to find out whether they…

> In all likelihood, it was healthier than the average child born at 28 weeks How do you know that about this case? "Statistically speaking" only works when talking about groups, not individuals.

I think what they're trying to say is that some fraction of early births are because of something wrong with the fetus or maternal environment, and so there's a selection effect where those who are born early are less healthy than those carried to full term.

That is, you probably expect a random child removed at 28 weeks to survive a greater fraction of the time than those spontaneously born at 28 weeks (which already survive at a very high rate).

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the entire idea of prosecution here, I think it's wrong, but I think we should recognize that Facebook was served with a lawful warrant for data here - surely we want facebook to obey the law in the countries they operate, and if a warrant is presented they should comply?

Yes, Facebook had to comply and because Facebook doesn't implement end-to-end encryption so that they can data mine their users' chat they had to provide the details. They could alternatively implement end-to-end encryption to protect themselves and their users from these warrants. Something like Signal where the service doesn't know what the messages are that are being sent between users so warrants for seizing that…

Yes, and E2EE was rolled out in 2016 to Messenger, and then was planned to be the default until regulators and NCMEC started screaming about CSAM, and rightly so. It's lose lose.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/27/22904650/meta-facebook-me...

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#88
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is all abortion law immoral? Why can't we draw a line somewhere before 28 weeks and say that if you want an abortion, you have to decide before 7 months have gone by? I can't imagine thinking that it should be legal to kill a full term fetus as it's being delivered solely because it hasn't been born yet.

First, as to the abortion question, I'm interested to hear what you think about https://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.h... (exegesis in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion ). As for "legal to kill a full term fetus as it's being delivered", of course that is not what is alleged to have happened in this case, and it is wrong, but most people who ever lived disagreed with me about t…

You are taking this so far off the rails.

We know what Nebraskans think about abortion - they made a 28 week abortion illegal. No mesothilic civilisation is relevant here.

If you think a 39 week abortion is wrong, as you say - at what point between 28 and 39 does the abortion become wrong, using the facts of this case?

You've already moved the goalposts away from all abortion law is immoral to agreeing with my example.

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could the fetus have survived? Much more likely than not at 28 weeks. ~50% viability is like a month earlier than that. > Would the fetus have had a good quality of life? Roughly even or better chances of lasting complications. Of course, some percentage of babies delivered at every stage of pregnancy have a chance of lasting complications. You could throw a "who could say" after anything you want.

And you have sufficient information about the parents in this case to say there were no complications factors or social challenges that may have caused those numbers to deviate from "normal"? My point is you cannot apply the average case to each individual case. You don't have enough data to confidently say "more likely than not" for this case.

I guess the obvious response to this is something along the lines of: newborn babies get adopted quicker than houses were bought during covid.

Of course that is hyperbole as there is an adoption process, but if the baby was not wanted she could have had all of her medical bills covered and given the child to a family that desperately wanted to raise said child.

I’ll just pick a side, 28 weeks is too late. 12, ok. Maybe I could be talked into 15 even. 28 is just too late. Hell my wife and I would have raised the kid if that was the alternative to an abortion so late.

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#90
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the European angle suddenly in every abortion discussion? I'm fascinated by how these kind of talking points emerge and then are suddenly everywhere, must be some kind of influencer coordination. (I'll probably get down voted for this because whenever I bring this kind of thing up people seem to get personally offended. Even though it's not your talking point, you picked up somewhere recently)

Because in Europe there are a lot of civilised countries with freedoms to aspire to.

This doesn't answer the question.

Why should we care what the European standard for abortion is?

Whether or not they have other freedoms that we don't have is irrelevant.

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