[RD] Abortion, once again

Actually, it isn't anymore, as far as publicly-accessible buildings are concerned. It's legally required for new buildings to ensure that they're accessible.

ramps outside, yes. not so sure about indoors/using as factor for employment at small scales. and definitely not true in all places either (such as outside us/canada/europe).

details matter, and as you're pointing out here "accessibility" is not purely black and white. there are varying degrees of ability/inconvenience allowed per the code, and those don't necessarily align to what one considers to be ethical, which itself is not a uniform thing.
 
ramps outside, yes. not so sure about indoors/using as factor for employment at small scales. and definitely not true in all places either (such as outside us/canada/europe).

details matter, and as you're pointing out here "accessibility" is not purely black and white. there are varying degrees of ability/inconvenience allowed per the code, and those don't necessarily align to what one considers to be ethical, which itself is not a uniform thing.
As I said (more than once), this is a topic for a different thread. I'm willing to have a respectful discussion about it with you, but NOT HERE.
 
it's not *that* nitpicky. it rules out some explanations to use the correct representation (that black/native americans specifically have worse outcomes), but does not rule out others.

Ah... like which...?

oh okay. actually that's not true, you can't prove any assertion even with infinite political power (i mean actually prove, not falsely claim and disappear dissenters). the explanation does have to be testable. "something outside the universe caused this to happen" or "god did it" are examples of things that won't work/can't actually be tested. i'm also not sure how one would go about testing whether tidal forces are a functional explanation for racial disparity as an example, if for some reason that society didn't reject it as absurd on its face. dictator blows up the moon as an experiment?

we have demonstrated causal relations with less absolute powers than that many times over. even mucked about through the weeds with much difficulty in some cases, such as some medical treatments/procedures or a distribution of causes from climate change. we have varying degrees of certainty depending on exact action in question, but these are things where we managed to demonstrate some causal relations.

i suspect that if we do this for observed racial disparities (good luck, but hypothetically), we will find some legitimate causal relations and others that are not, with many of the former cases also influencing our observations regarding the latter.

that distinction actually *matters* though, because changing the latter stuff is useless, while changing the former could be massively beneficial (depending on the degree to which it is a cause).

You're overestimating what can be done there.
There was some recent study, forgot the exact context, examining policy interventions against poverty, in forms of money, or additional life coaching or bussiness coaching. Showed that the additional interventions work very well. No hard conclusions for the reasoning. I'd have my doubts that you even could.
 
Ah... like which...?

read a bit further down in the post you quoted for an example.

There was some recent study, forgot the exact context, examining policy interventions against poverty, in forms of money, or additional life coaching or bussiness coaching. Showed that the additional interventions work very well.

did one of these interventions perform better than the other?
 
again, quoted is objectively false.

we only observe this in particular minority groups, not "women of color" generally. some "women of color" have better outcomes than white women, on average. thus, using "minority group" or "women of color" in a general sense does not predict the results we observe and we should not use that to describe what's happening.



there are costs associated with everything. people choose whether it's worth paying them vs not. that's up to the shop to decide in this hypothetical, which depends on a number of factors.

don't know what you're on about wrt moving goalposts or w/e. you claimed i'm doing bigoted opinions and other random ad hominems and argued against things i didn't write. don't know what you expect me to say in response other than that doing that is silly.



however, neither are the "racial disparities", necessarily. it depends to what extent the policy causes the disparity, rather than produces a result that reflects that they exist without meaningfully altering them. it's not "intention" that matters. what matters is "does this thing actually cause the observed disparity or not". when it's tidal forces, everyone says no. when it's jim crow, everyone says yes (because disparity *was* the policy, directly). usually, it's not that obvious. but you still need something better than picking at random or using explanations that work equally well for jim crow vs tidal forces. those were different things.



throwing in jail, yes. but make no mistake, we'll be seeing plenty of lawsuits of all varieties and varying abuses of judicial power along the way. i'd bet on that.



if the correlation is enough by itself, you're stuck concluding the moon is innately racist. i'm not comfortable with that conclusion, and i suspect you're not either. the same rationale doesn't become good/useful/predictive when you pick something other than "moon".



earlier in thread i clarified that i was looking for a mechanistic explanation that at least (in principle) could be tested, even if that test is impractical or difficult to parse out. at least something we can work with.

that serves two purposes: 1) it gives at least some credibility that altering the policy based on the observation is useful and 2) if you can test it even somewhat it will get you closer to directly sourcing which factors most contribute to the observed disparity. by narrowing the possibilities, if nothing else.



if you are talking about constraining abortion, the burden of evidence is on the "pro-life" position, which seeks to constrain the freedoms of others based on an assertion that is difficult to prove/demonstrate.

if you are talking about claiming abortion policy is "innately racist", then the burden of evidence shifts to providing causal factors that support the assertion, independent of whether such a policy is justifiable generally.

my default position based on what we have in this thread is that the pro-life position has not given useful evidence to support blocking abortion before 3rd trimester (after which abortions are very rare and usually have health reasons anyway), but that we have no evidence to support the the policy itself is racist. just that randomly constraining abortions w/o a sound basis for the cutoff point is bad process/bad for everyone.



of course something is wrong, that's undeniable. the problem is attributing cause to this particular policy:
  • maternal deaths are a problem regardless of abortion policy
  • maternal deaths demonstrate a similar rate disparity regardless of abortion policy, from what i can tell
  • the solution to higher rate of maternal deaths involves better processes to find and address life-threatening problems before they kill mothers
    • this is being done less reliably for black and native americans. why? answering that lets us actually decrease maternal death rate for these groups. our approach can and should change depending on whether they're visiting hospitals less frequently vs they're further from hospitals vs they have more comorbidities vs other potential causes. this is hard to pin down but if you actually want to get better you need to do it
    • a useful place to start would be to see if this disparity holds consistently across all local regions of the country. because if it does not, you can look at what is being done differently locally.
    • for example, maternal death rate for black americans does not appear to be a significant issue in vermont or delaware, where maternal death rate is close to 0 per 100,000 for the entire states. california has 4 per 100k, while on the opposite end states like louisiana, georgia, and new jersey are all over 38 per 100k. louisiana is more than 10x worse than california in this statistic. these places are clearly doing things differently with very different standards of care.
  • what reasons do we predict for different levels of care for black americans in states like louisiana? i suspect that they're being outright underserved in urban areas that don't have capacity or staff up to standards elsewhere right now as a leading factor, plus that black women are also being hit with disproportionate amounts of the overdosing/violence subset of maternal deaths there. but i might be wrong about that.


unless we get new information i don't expect in the near-future, we're stuck guessing a heck of a lot of things before the fetus is viable. i don't like to restrict people's rights, especially fundamental ones, on a guess. that counts for the "maybe child" too, but not as much as for the mother, unless i see evidence otherwise.

what we're stuck with, and probably a big reason this is so contentious, is that we more or less have to pick where to put the legal moat regardless of the fact that doing so requires at least some guesses/assumptions.

the closest thing we have right now is "can it survive without the mother", because at least that's something we can answer with some degree of confidence. you can answer "yes" or "no" or give a probability estimate based on empirical data. it doesn't answer everything, but it's something to work with, and conveniently consistent with a cutoff point nearly everyone (including the mothers) make willingly anyway. we can probably deal with the extremely small subset of 3rd trimester abortions that aren't being done for exceptional reasons like "this will kill the mother" or "the fetus is already dead" or "the fetus will die horribly after being born within 2 years" or similar. they just aren't that common otherwise.
So how many unwanted children have you adopted? Fostered? Volunteered at shelters and schools?

Too many people who think life begins at conception have a curious habit of not being willing to support children, parents, and families after tge fetus becomes a person at birth. Btw, my wife and I have fostered two children. We volunteer at the local grade school. We raised two children who are now adults contributing to society (one us a school teacher). See, I put my money where my mouth is.
 
Most Indian tribes are exempt from state laws. No reason a tribe couldn't go into the abortion business and open up clinics on tribal land in red states.
 
aside for the usual reasons indians don't open up abortion clinics, you mean.

i'm not sure the marginal extra people who can a) reach indian reservations but b) can't reach a state where abortion is legal for them would be great enough to justify significant investment into the training required to be a physician in the usa, beyond what they are already doing for other reasons. i could be mistaken, but i don't think it's that big of a business once you filter for the % of people who meet both conditions a and b *and* actually want an abortion.
 
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huh, maybe those distances are different enough to create a market after all. especially in the texas/oklahoma/louisiana triangle. i don't expect it will matter as much elsewhere, but who knows.

if they can get the expertise to do it and it's worth doing to them, then why not.
 
Texas, OK, Florida, LA, SC, MS, AL, KS, WY, ID, UT, AZ could all have clinics in opposition to state laws.
 
huh, maybe those distances are different enough to create a market after all. especially in the texas/oklahoma/louisiana triangle. i don't expect it will matter as much elsewhere, but who knows.

if they can get the expertise to do it and it's worth doing to them, then why not.
Some people who live near the Canada/U.S. border use clinics across the border because they're much closer than the clinics in their own country. This is now in jeopardy.
 
@Birdjaguar A quick glance at your map tells me that even if reservation clinics became a thing most of them are so geographically isolated I doubt they can move the needle all that much.

A woman in Jacksonville, FL seeking an abortion would be looking at a 7-8 hour car ride, minimum.
 
@Birdjaguar A quick glance at your map tells me that even if reservation clinics became a thing most of them are so geographically isolated I doubt they can move the needle all that much.

A woman in Jacksonville, FL seeking an abortion would be looking at a 7-8 hour car ride, minimum.
Yes, it is not perfect, but it would be better than none. The Seminoles are outside Miami and would be important in that big metro district. Such a move would offer a big fu to the governors.
 
I wouldn't doubt it's possible. I live near one of the Seneca reservations in New York and they have recreational marijuana dispensaries all over the place now. The rest of New York only has legal medicinal, afaik.
 
Tribal sovereignty is a real thing, for good and bad.
 
Tribal sovereignty is a real thing, for good and bad.

If this vision of tribal reservation abortion clinics comes to pass the pro-lifers will certainly discard tribal sovereignty to save the babies
 
New York has definitely interfered with the Seneca's in the past. When that one blind dude was their governor he refused to fix the stretch of I-86 that passed through through their lands due to disputes regarding excise taxes on gas and cigarettes.
 
If this vision of tribal reservation abortion clinics comes to pass the pro-lifers will certainly discard tribal sovereignty to save the babies
It would be difficult unless they can pass a federal ban law, but even then, tribes would be very resistant to any attempts to diminish sovereignty. Of course any such federal law would supersede all the state laws so I'm sure many states would object. Things would get complicated.
 
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