Cloud_Strife
Deity
Always has been, disgusting nation
[RD] Abortion, once again
- Thread starter Angst
- Start date
Always has been, disgusting nation
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
Texas law will allow residents to sue mail-order abortion pill providers
Texas will sign into law legislation that allows private citizens to sue out-of-state providers who supply abortion pills to residents of the state.The bill - expected to be signed by the governor on Thursday - permits residents to bring lawsuits against manufacturers or distributors of abortion medication, with successful plaintiffs entitled to at least $100,000 (£74,500) in damages.
Texas has a near-total ban on abortions, and opponents of the new law say this is a way to intimidate abortion providers outside the state.
Nearly two-thirds of the abortions in the US are via medications - a two-pill regimen using mifepristone and misoprostol, administered within the first 12 weeks.
Providers who are sued would be forced to pay the pregnant woman, the man who impregnated her or other relatives the $100,000 in damages. The women who take the medication to end a pregnancy can't be sued.
If the lawsuit is brought by a person who is not part of the family, they could only receive $10,000. The remaining $90,000 goes to charity, the bill says.
The legislation is expected to face multiple legal challenges, as other abortions restrictions have in the past.
Blair Wallace, of the ACLU of Texas, said the bill motivated "neighbors to police one another's reproductive lives, further isolating pregnant Texans, and punishing the people who care for them".
Texas is among the states that severely restrict nearly all abortions following the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade.
A handful of US states, all led by Democrats, allow abortion providers to prescribe and mail abortion pills to patients elsewhere in the US under what are called "shield laws" that give those providers legal protection from out-of-state prosecution.
But the Texas legislation specifically says that shield laws cannot be used as a defence in the lawsuits filed under it.
The Supreme Court could ultimately decide which state law prevails.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39rk2zry7go
danjuno
Cole Phelps, Badge 1247
Abusers helping abusers make money off their victims. I expect nothing less from the GOP.
i would think that random people in TX would not have standing to sue. @JollyRoger
This is the same vigilante stunt they pulled with regards to abortion in general before Roe v. Wade was overturned. The Federal Supreme Court basically punted in December 2021 on the issue saying that someone sued under it could raise defenses that could then be potentially reviewable.
The Americans are now officially saying that birth control is abortions, with IUDs and the pill called "abortifacient" in official government statements.
caketastydelish
Deity
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2008
- Messages
- 9,861
What is done to a womans body should be the womans choice. Case closed.
Meta is Removing Abortion Advocates' Accounts Without Warning
When the team at Women Help Women signed into Instagram last winter, they were met with a distressing surprise: without warning, Meta had disabled their account. The abortion advocacy non-profit organization found itself suddenly cut off from its tens of thousands of followers and with limited recourse. Meta claimed Women Help Women had violated its Community Standards on “guns, drugs, and other restricted goods,” but the organization told EFF it uses Instagram only to communicate about safe abortion practices, including sharing educational content and messages aimed at reducing stigma. Eventually, Women Help Women was able to restore its account, but only after launching a public campaign and receiving national news coverage.
Unfortunately, Women Help Women’s experience is not unique. Around a quarter of our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign submissions reported that their entire account or page had been disabled or taken down after sharing abortion information—primarily on Meta platforms. This troubling pattern indicates that the censorship crisis goes beyond content removal. Accounts providing crucial reproductive health information are disappearing, often without warning, cutting users off from their communities and followers entirely.
What's worse, Meta appears to be imposing these negative account actions without clearly adhering to its own enforcement policies. Meta’s Transparency Center stipulates that an account should receive multiple Community Standards violations or warnings before it is restricted or disabled. Yet many affected users told EFF they experienced negative account actions without any warning at all, or after only one alleged violation (many of which were incorrectly flagged, as we’ve explained elsewhere in this series).
This is the fifth installment in a blog series documenting EFF's findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here.
When the team at Women Help Women signed into Instagram last winter, they were met with a distressing surprise: without warning, Meta had disabled their account. The abortion advocacy non-profit organization found itself suddenly cut off from its tens of thousands of followers and with limited recourse. Meta claimed Women Help Women had violated its Community Standards on “guns, drugs, and other restricted goods,” but the organization told EFF it uses Instagram only to communicate about safe abortion practices, including sharing educational content and messages aimed at reducing stigma. Eventually, Women Help Women was able to restore its account, but only after launching a public campaign and receiving national news coverage.
Unfortunately, Women Help Women’s experience is not unique. Around a quarter of our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign submissions reported that their entire account or page had been disabled or taken down after sharing abortion information—primarily on Meta platforms. This troubling pattern indicates that the censorship crisis goes beyond content removal. Accounts providing crucial reproductive health information are disappearing, often without warning, cutting users off from their communities and followers entirely.
What's worse, Meta appears to be imposing these negative account actions without clearly adhering to its own enforcement policies. Meta’s Transparency Center stipulates that an account should receive multiple Community Standards violations or warnings before it is restricted or disabled. Yet many affected users told EFF they experienced negative account actions without any warning at all, or after only one alleged violation (many of which were incorrectly flagged, as we’ve explained elsewhere in this series).
This is the fifth installment in a blog series documenting EFF's findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here.
danjuno
Cole Phelps, Badge 1247
This article is from September? 
danjuno
Cole Phelps, Badge 1247
Genetically Engineered Babies Are Banned in the US. But Tech Titans Are Trying to Make One Anyway
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup — called Preventive — has been quietly preparing what would amount to a biological first. They are working toward creating a child born from an embryo edited to prevent a hereditary disease.... Editing genes in embryos with the intention of creating babies from them is banned in the U.S. and many countries. Preventive has been searching for places to experiment where embryo editing is allowed, including the United Arab Emirates, according to correspondence reviewed by The Wall Street Journal...
Preventive is in the vanguard of a growing number of startups, funded by some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, that are pushing the boundaries of fertility and working to commercialize reproductive genetic technologies. Some are working on embryo editing, while others are already selling genetic screening tools that seek to account for the influence of dozens or hundreds of genes on a trait. They say their ultimate goal is to produce babies who are free of genetic disease and resilient against illnesses. Some say they can also give parents the ability to choose embryos that will have higher IQs and preferred traits such as height and eye color. Armstrong, the cryptocurrency billionaire, is leading the charge to make embryo editing a reality. He has told people that gene-editing technology could produce children who are less prone to heart disease, with lower cholesterol and stronger bones to prevent osteoporosis. According to documents and people briefed on his plans, he is already an investor or in talks with embryo editing ventures...
After the Journal approached people close to the company last month to ask about its work, Preventive announced on its website that it had raised $30 million in investment to explore embryo editing. The statement pledged not to advance to human trials "if safety cannot be established through extensive research..." Other embryo editing startups are Manhattan Genomics, co-founded by Thiel Fellow Cathy Tie, and Bootstrap Bio, which plans to conduct tests in Honduras. Both companies are in early stages.
Many experts worry that the science is too unpredictable to be safe and could usher in a new era of human experimentation by private companies without public or government input or debate. Some also raise the specter of eugenics.
One plan Armstrong floated, according to people he has talked to, was for a venture to work in secret and reveal a healthy genetically engineered baby before the scientific and medical establishment had a chance to object—a leap meant to shock the world into acceptance.
“These people are not working on genetic diseases,” said Fyodor Urnov, a director at the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “They are either lying, delusional, or both. These people armed with very poorly deployed sacks of cash are working on ‘baby improvement.’”
Scientists say they still don’t understand everything about the human genome or how different genes interact with each other. Any edits, changes or deletions of an embryo’s genes could be passed down to future generations, including unintended mistakes.
“Responsible adults agree we can’t do it now because it’s unreasonably unsafe,” said Stanford University bioethicist Hank Greely. “The risk-benefit ratio sucks at this point.”
Separately from embryo editing, startups are vastly expanding the power of genetic screening technology.
Some genetic tests for embryos, for sex and diseases such as cystic fibrosis and Tay Sachs, have long been available to parents who undergo IVF. Some parents choose which embryos to implant on the basis of those tests, deciding between freezing, discarding or donating the embryos they don’t use.
Several prominent members of the Silicon Valley elite, including Altman and Elon Musk, have used polygenic screening to evaluate embryos for their children, people briefed on the matter said.
Musk used Orchid to select embryos for two children he had with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain-computer interface company Neuralink, one of the people said. Musk, Zilis and their representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Anomaly is a vocal defender of voluntary eugenics. Humans, he wrote in 2018, should make reproductive choices that “produce future people who thrive.”
During the event, he displayed an image of a mobile Nazi gas chamber used to kill people with disabilities to make the point that Herasight’s aim is “morally a completely different model than the worst form of state-sponsored coercive eugenics.”
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup — called Preventive — has been quietly preparing what would amount to a biological first. They are working toward creating a child born from an embryo edited to prevent a hereditary disease.... Editing genes in embryos with the intention of creating babies from them is banned in the U.S. and many countries. Preventive has been searching for places to experiment where embryo editing is allowed, including the United Arab Emirates, according to correspondence reviewed by The Wall Street Journal...
Preventive is in the vanguard of a growing number of startups, funded by some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, that are pushing the boundaries of fertility and working to commercialize reproductive genetic technologies. Some are working on embryo editing, while others are already selling genetic screening tools that seek to account for the influence of dozens or hundreds of genes on a trait. They say their ultimate goal is to produce babies who are free of genetic disease and resilient against illnesses. Some say they can also give parents the ability to choose embryos that will have higher IQs and preferred traits such as height and eye color. Armstrong, the cryptocurrency billionaire, is leading the charge to make embryo editing a reality. He has told people that gene-editing technology could produce children who are less prone to heart disease, with lower cholesterol and stronger bones to prevent osteoporosis. According to documents and people briefed on his plans, he is already an investor or in talks with embryo editing ventures...
After the Journal approached people close to the company last month to ask about its work, Preventive announced on its website that it had raised $30 million in investment to explore embryo editing. The statement pledged not to advance to human trials "if safety cannot be established through extensive research..." Other embryo editing startups are Manhattan Genomics, co-founded by Thiel Fellow Cathy Tie, and Bootstrap Bio, which plans to conduct tests in Honduras. Both companies are in early stages.
Many experts worry that the science is too unpredictable to be safe and could usher in a new era of human experimentation by private companies without public or government input or debate. Some also raise the specter of eugenics.
One plan Armstrong floated, according to people he has talked to, was for a venture to work in secret and reveal a healthy genetically engineered baby before the scientific and medical establishment had a chance to object—a leap meant to shock the world into acceptance.
“These people are not working on genetic diseases,” said Fyodor Urnov, a director at the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “They are either lying, delusional, or both. These people armed with very poorly deployed sacks of cash are working on ‘baby improvement.’”
Scientists say they still don’t understand everything about the human genome or how different genes interact with each other. Any edits, changes or deletions of an embryo’s genes could be passed down to future generations, including unintended mistakes.
“Responsible adults agree we can’t do it now because it’s unreasonably unsafe,” said Stanford University bioethicist Hank Greely. “The risk-benefit ratio sucks at this point.”
Separately from embryo editing, startups are vastly expanding the power of genetic screening technology.
Some genetic tests for embryos, for sex and diseases such as cystic fibrosis and Tay Sachs, have long been available to parents who undergo IVF. Some parents choose which embryos to implant on the basis of those tests, deciding between freezing, discarding or donating the embryos they don’t use.
Several prominent members of the Silicon Valley elite, including Altman and Elon Musk, have used polygenic screening to evaluate embryos for their children, people briefed on the matter said.
Musk used Orchid to select embryos for two children he had with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain-computer interface company Neuralink, one of the people said. Musk, Zilis and their representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Anomaly is a vocal defender of voluntary eugenics. Humans, he wrote in 2018, should make reproductive choices that “produce future people who thrive.”
During the event, he displayed an image of a mobile Nazi gas chamber used to kill people with disabilities to make the point that Herasight’s aim is “morally a completely different model than the worst form of state-sponsored coercive eugenics.”
EnglishEdward
Deity
I think it better to get it proven effective and safe with animals first.
Even if it annoys the PETA crowd.
Even if it annoys the PETA crowd.
This technology is widely used in animals. In experimental settings it is kind of an every day lab technique, and I think it is at least approaching the field in places, though I do not actually know of any widespread use:
Generation of cloned transgenic pigs rich in omega-3 fatty acids
Production of hornless dairy cattle from genome-edited cell lines
Precision engineering for Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS) resistance in pigs
Correction of a Disease Mutation using CRISPR/Cas9-assisted Genome Editing in Japanese Black Cattle
TALE nickase-mediated SP110 knockin endows cattle with increased resistance to tuberculosis
EnglishEdward
Deity
Yes, I know; but I think it still has a high going wrong rate.
But it may be I am out of date.
It depends what you mean by going wrong. Detected off target insertions/deletions are incredibly low. I have not seen the rigorous full genome analysis of significant numbers of animals that would make one really confident they do not happen, but some people think they do not. It is pretty amazing really, and it does not surprise me that some people are tempted to try. I think it is a very bad idea though.
EnglishEdward
Deity
I am not sure how reliable the statistics are. Mad experimental scientists probably find covering up failure easier with animals than humans.
I can assure you that most if not all of the data on this is right. It is not the sort of thing they would lie about. Finding this sort of off target effect would get you a really high profile paper.
EnglishEdward
Deity
Well I must take your word for that, my advanced mathematical skills are, like my four player chess grade, sadly declining with age.
South Carolina looks at most restrictive abortion bill in the US as opponents keep pushing limits
Sending women who get abortions to prison for decades. Outlawing IUDs. Sharply restricting in-vitro fertilization. These are the strictest abortion prohibitions and punishments in the nation being considered by South Carolina lawmakers, even as opponents of the procedure are divided over how far to go.
The proposal would ban all abortions unless the woman’s life is at risk and eliminates exceptions for rape and incest victims up to 12 weeks. Current law blocks abortions after cardiac activity is detected, which is typically six weeks into a pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant.
The proposal would also go further than any other U.S. state. Women who get an abortion and anyone who helps them could face up to 30 years in prison. It appears to ban any contraception that prevents a fertilized egg from implanting. That would ban IUDs and could strictly limit in-vitro fertilization.
OB-GYN Natalie Gregory said passing a bill like this would make so many discussions in her practice — from contraceptives to losing a pregnancy to in-vitro fertilization options — a “legal minefield” that could have her risking decades in prison.
“It constitutes a unconstitutional reach that threatens the very fabric of health care in our state,” she said during an eight-hour public hearing on the bill last month, adding that the proposal is both a waste of time and public money.
Abortion opponents are split over punishing women
The proposal has even split groups that oppose abortion and once celebrated together when South Carolina passed the six-week ban in 2021, a trigger law set to take effect if Roe v. Wade was overturned.
South Carolina Citizens for Life, one of the state’s largest and oldest opponents of abortion, issued a statement the day of last month’s hearing saying it can’t support the bill because women who get abortions are victims too and shouldn’t be punished.
On the other side, at least for this bill, are groups like Equal Protection South Carolina. “Abortion is murder and should be treated as such,” the group’s founder Mark Corral said.
Sending women who get abortions to prison for decades. Outlawing IUDs. Sharply restricting in-vitro fertilization. These are the strictest abortion prohibitions and punishments in the nation being considered by South Carolina lawmakers, even as opponents of the procedure are divided over how far to go.
The proposal would ban all abortions unless the woman’s life is at risk and eliminates exceptions for rape and incest victims up to 12 weeks. Current law blocks abortions after cardiac activity is detected, which is typically six weeks into a pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant.
The proposal would also go further than any other U.S. state. Women who get an abortion and anyone who helps them could face up to 30 years in prison. It appears to ban any contraception that prevents a fertilized egg from implanting. That would ban IUDs and could strictly limit in-vitro fertilization.
OB-GYN Natalie Gregory said passing a bill like this would make so many discussions in her practice — from contraceptives to losing a pregnancy to in-vitro fertilization options — a “legal minefield” that could have her risking decades in prison.
“It constitutes a unconstitutional reach that threatens the very fabric of health care in our state,” she said during an eight-hour public hearing on the bill last month, adding that the proposal is both a waste of time and public money.
Abortion opponents are split over punishing women
The proposal has even split groups that oppose abortion and once celebrated together when South Carolina passed the six-week ban in 2021, a trigger law set to take effect if Roe v. Wade was overturned.
South Carolina Citizens for Life, one of the state’s largest and oldest opponents of abortion, issued a statement the day of last month’s hearing saying it can’t support the bill because women who get abortions are victims too and shouldn’t be punished.
On the other side, at least for this bill, are groups like Equal Protection South Carolina. “Abortion is murder and should be treated as such,” the group’s founder Mark Corral said.
