And like all things American, the worst outcomes involved women of color.
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.
Yeah, there will usually be extra $$$$$ associated with making sure a building is disabled-accessible, so it's best to do it from the get-go, rather than find out later when the building is triumphantly opened to the public and then OOPS! It's discovered that there are segments of the public for whom it is either inaccessible or unsafe.
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.
You've written here a nice summation of why I think intention isn't super-important when looking at policies that have outcomes with racial disparities.
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.
It's the pro-life side who want to throw people in jail and file lawsuits against people
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.
Also, I'm thinking more about whether I agree that a causal link is strictly necessary to demand more sensible behavior, or if an as-yet-mysterious correlation is enough.
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".
It depends what you mean by testable.
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 we required an experiment in this case, I would think that supports the pro-choice position
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.
So if there's something going on that seems to result in the proposed restrictions being even more onerous for Black and indigenous people
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.
This is why I focus so much on the personhood of the early fetus. I acknowledge that the discussion around later timepoints is going to include a heavy component of 'legal moat'.
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.
It wasn't meant to be an argument for paying money to women who don't want a baby, it was an argument against forcing women to have babies they don't want. I wouldn't want to figure out how to make this idea work, in the real world.
