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Comment on Texas Could Push Tech Platforms to Censor Posts About Abortionparent

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Regulating a medical procedure and suppressing online sources of information about illegal procedures may conflict with certain libertarian beliefs, but it’s not “fascist.” By your reasoning, it’s “fascist” for Germany to take away people’s right of free association by banning Nazi parties, and to suppress discussion of Nazism. But nobody thinks that.

The crux of your disagreement with what Texas is doing isn’t about the methods. It’s about your substantive disagreement regarding the morality of killing a human fetus.

Again a weak argument, your previous one was so bad you had to delete it and come up with a new bad analogy?

This is not regulating a medical procedure, it is inserting politics into a medical decision. It has nothing to do with medicine. It is forcing your beliefs on other people. There are valid reasons to regulate abortion, this is obviously not one at all, it will just result in worse health outcomes. And blocking any discussion of what is a legal and scientific procedure in other states is text-book fascist and as un-American as it can get.

Texas has chosen to ban a medical procedure that kills a human fetus after a certain stage of development. It has done so based on moral judgments about when killing a human fetus should be permitted, and when it should be prohibited.

Virtually every liberal democracy does the same thing. They just pick a different developmental milestone. There is no scientific reason why Denmark or Germany’s 12-week ban is more justifiable than Texas’s 12-week ban. And those countries insert moral judgments into regulation of other medical procedures, everything from euthanasia to female circumcision.

Your regurgitation of libertarian talking points misses the mark. Virtually every liberal democracy recognizes that society can make judgments about what's right and wrong, and regulate individual conduct based on those judgments. (And outside the U.S., most liberal democracies recognize the right of the government to suppress information that society deems harmful.) None of that is "fascist."

There is no scientific reason why Denmark or Germany’s 12-week ban [permitted if mother's life or health in danger or for other reasons, per Wikipedia] is more justifiable than Texas’s 12-week ban.

It's not a purely-scientific question. Blackmun got it approximately right in Roe v. Wade.

Right, it’s not a purely scientific question. It’s impossible to extricate moral judgments from the question. Which is why Texas drawing the line at 6 weeks isn’t “fascist.”

Blackmun was a libertarian who snuck onto the court during the bad old days when the GOP failed to vet their judicial appointments. As professor Ely wrote: Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Roe was uniquely indefensible, having no basis in constitutional text, long-standing tradition, original intent, international consensus, or public opinion either then or now. Half a century after Roe was authored, most people even in liberal democracies still think you shouldn’t be able to kill a fetus with a face absent risks to the mother’s health.

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