"Last May, EFF reported that a sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion."
Making examples out of some number of unlucky peasants over otherwise trivial deviance that harms nearly nobody is one of the key jobs of men at arms.
Now, they may spend more time on "real crime" or collecting taxes by other names, but make no mistake this sort of stuff is stuff they (as an agency) must do if they are to properly serve the interests of their master.
They literally think they are doing the work of some divine creator. They have plenty of time to ruin the lives of other people because they think it saves their own.
And many of these people really do need their Good Works on the force to do the saving, because God knows what they do to their wives and kids back home.
They also believe in eternal torture as punishment. If someone doesn't accept their god, their god will send that person's soul to hell to be tortured forever. Therefore, essentially anything can be justified to force people to accept their god, since no finite amount of harm can exceed the infinite torture of hell.
People who believe that sort of thing are, IMO, extremely evil, and worshiping an evil deity.
> from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader
This feels purposefully misleading. Did they manually watch hours and hours of footage, or is this the equivalent of "I searched an online corpus of hundreds of millions of documents" (I Googled it)
Sure, call it that. They Googled it on their comperensive, nation-wide, unlimited access, fully indexed and integrated surveillance network (with 83,000 edge nodes)
As someone that does, I disagree. Laws on this subject should exclusively apply to providers, with exceptions for medical necessity. There are too many harms that come from targeting individuals to be worthwhile.
Either argue the point or stop talking. This is a very hard position to take seriously, twee frowny face and all, if you’re willing to sell down the river the privacy of a largely vulnerable population because some sanctimonious humanism. :(
I am not an antiabortion crusader. I'm offering what I understand to be the antiabortion position here. By ":(" I wanted to imply "Unfortunately there are seemingly lots of people who seem to hold this view genuinely and very strongly", which was not my greatest moment of clear communication.
The only reasons to entertain that perspective is their personal delusions which they ought not impose on others also when an act takes place in one jurisdiction wherein all actors are within that jurisdiction it is obviously nonsense to apply a different justifications laws to the act based on their residence.
> getting an abortion is a minute not spent tracking down a murderer
but see, there are people who believe abortion is murder, and perhaps one of the worst forms of murder because of its victim’s extreme innocence since it has not caused any harm in this world.
> I would accept that such people are entitled to their beliefs only if they would equally believe in the extreme innocence of a chicken who has not caused any harm in this world and they would seek to punish the murderer of the chicken.
Why is equating human and chicken life necessary for you to accept that people are entitled to their beliefs?
> A finger is not able to live independently, but the same is true for an embryo.
The finger is the person's DNA. The child is not their DNA.
In a 2025 University of Iowa single-center study (published in JAMA Network Open), out of 22 infants born alive at 21 weeks gestation, resuscitation was attempted in 17. 6 survived to NICU discharge (about 35%), and 1 remained hospitalized.
Weird-ass pagan child worship located nowhere in the Bible. The strange idea that people are born clean and deserving, and that life makes them filthy and worthy of death. A really hateful, sadistic ideology. Christians did not care about abortion until the late 18th century, it's not even an old belief.
You can have a nearly identical baby in less than a year. A 50-year old takes 51 years to make.
That being said, the weird secular idea that babies are meaningless lumps of protein until they are born and are suddenly ensouled is equally silly. They're just arguing about dates, and at least the Christian tradition actually believes in a soul. I don't think most secular people could explain why you shouldn't kill an infant other than they find it distasteful, like eating a dog (when you eat pig and cow.)
That abortion is more distasteful than murder is a modern political culture-war position, though, that nobody would have considered until at least the early-mid 20th century. In fact, the idea that babies were sinless meant that they would go to Heaven, so 19th century Christians greatly preferred to murder a baby, turn themselves in and be executed for the crime rather than commit suicide (which was an express ticket to Hell.) Both the baby and the believer could then go to Heaven.
You assume that a lady getting an abortion is not committing murder--these folks clearly think she is.
(We don't need to argue about whether it is in fact murder, or whether if it is that the murder is justified or not--just understand that there are people that believe differently, and apparently they're willing to expend police resources on it.)
> We don't need to argue about whether it is in fact murder
That's exactly the problem: we do. Not here, specifically, but if someone's false beliefs have grown to the point that they are hurting others over them, they need to be stopped.
Do you not realize that this argument applies equally well both against pro-choice and against pro-lifers? It does, therefore it is entirely invalid and irrelevant.
Yes, those people with "false beliefs". Ah, if only we could force everyone to have true beliefs. And it's not against freedom of thought and consciousness, oh no! We're only against actually false beliefs. That, you know, have been proven wrong. Or at least for which the proofs of incorrectness exist that we believe are correct. But since our beliefs true, this is fine.
It's fascinating that you are attempting to portray a comment as authoritarian that is arguing people should not enforce their false beliefs on others and should not restrict their bodily autonomy. It's literally an argument against being authoritarian.
What I understood their point to be is that the only reason they are "false beliefs" is your own biases. If they aren't actual "false beliefs", then the restrictions on bodily autonomy are as justified as when dealing with killings, and your argument degenerates into pro-authoritarism.
Some things are categorically false, and those conclusions can be reached rationally. That seemed to be his only point, and he did not say anything about preventing anyone (like Carroll's Queen of Hearts) from believing six impossible things before breakfast. That would be authoritarian.
In a democracy like ours, stopping the Queen and others from enacting restrictive and harmful policy based on impossibilities only requires convincing arguments. People are still perfectly free to believe in Creationism, but convincing arguments have removed it from curricula.
> stopping the Queen and others from enacting restrictive and harmful policy
Like regulating the production, sales, and use of opiates. Or tightly restricting the abortions. Or forcing people to wear seatbelts while driving (and two years ago on this very HN I've seen lots of people complaining about state-mandated vehicular safety, so no, the seatbelts are not an uncontroversial topic). There are many other examples of the authoritarian nanny states unduly restricting bodily autonomy of people.
Crucially, most of those policies aren't really based on truth or falsity of anything but simply on a value call. Forcing people to wear seatbelts may or may not actually reduce vehicular injuries (in fact, some research indicates that wearing seatbelts makes one more prone to reckless driving) — they're mandated anyhow, simply because some people believe it's the right thing to do.
As I said, the law is the problem. Since the law demands to track and investigate ladies suspected of destruction of embryos inside their own bodies, the police's direct job is to do just that, even to the detriment of other activities.
The police themselves may consider it stupid and counterproductive, but their opinion does not count until the next elections.
The universality of "I want the rule of law!.. unless I dislike the laws, of course" stance is truly depressing. I swear, were it not for rather strict ground-level prohibitions in the constitutions, we'd all went back to allegedly enlightened monarchies ages ago. Perhaps we yet all will, things really are looking quite peculiar around the world right now.
Incest is not always consensual, and incest may be intra-family molestation or sexual abuse. In those cases, certainly the "rape exceptions" cover mothers who seek to abort their unborn children.
However, incest is not always non-consensual, such as between ordinary adults who just cross a "bright line boundary" and have a sexual affair that they may or may not regret. So is this why there are so many exceptions for "non-rape incest" abortions? Why, to avoid being exposed to shame or having, for example, siblings need to co-parent their rather illicit offspring that nobody will talk about? What's unique about "non-rape incest" that it requires its own carved-out exception that is so often baked into all the laws prohibiting other kinds of abortions?
You are incorrect. The logic behind a separate incest exception is that the vast majority of incest is at least coercive/groomed if not forcible rape, but qualifying for the rape exception would require meeting the significant and probably-not-achievable standard of proving rape months after it happened. And in many incest cases that means specifically "proving rape" after years and years "intimate relations," given again that most incest cases are coerced/groomed for years or decades.
Seems like sheriff was searching for missing person. Was concern about her welfare and mental health, thus the use of the cameras. You can buy Mifepristone at CVS, Target, Walgreen's and the like. I don't think they were trying to track which CVS she was going to.
The article is misleading, but that should never get in the way of righteous rage that helps a person form identity and purpose in an otherwise existential and empty vacuum of meaning.
They lie to you constantly and they know it. You are being rage-baited to farm you votes, clicks, views, and likes:
According to internal Johnson County Sheriff's Office files released under the Texas Public Information Act, the entire "self-administered abortion" narrative was fabricated by a violent felon:
The Ex-Girlfriend's Account: The woman later informed investigators that she had actually suffered a natural miscarriage after her ex-boyfriend physically assaulted her.
The False Fetus Evidence: The ex-boyfriend—seeking to deflect blame for the assault—collected a blood clot from the miscarriage, presented it to the police, and lied by claiming his ex-girlfriend had intentionally taken illegal abortion pills to end a pregnancy.
The Intent of the Search: The police reports later clarified that while the deputy typed "had an abortion" into the Flock Safety tracking system, they were actually attempting to locate the woman and her children because she was fleeing from this domestic violence situation.
Because the initial report was based on a malicious and fabricated claim by an abuser, an official clinical timeline of the pregnancy was never established or verified in the official "death investigation" file.
We had a lady down here in Estonia working for police. She used their extensive databases for non-work related reasons and got, very publicly, fired. She decided to appeal and lost. Through all levels of court up to the EU one. So for years, there would be a newspaper headline “remember that person who invaded your privacy? Still guilty”. Could not wish for a more impactful public execution.
It's no longer safe to even use a period tracking app in many US states now. The women I know are all cautioning each other to go back to pen and paper, and ditch anything app based.
Most of us here knows ways around this, but many people are not educated.
One method is get off your smart phone and boot tails and do the searches there. Maybe that is something EFF can make known. Like list trusted onion sites that have information where women can go and get help.
One reason the government surveillance is important is I've read there is a growing movement among the right-to-lifers to hold women who abort criminally liable.
wild that it took abortion for people to notice. the same cameras have been feeding ICE lookups across 5,000+ towns, quietly, for the last couple years
Education is often best achieved through spaced repetition and cross-discipline integration, especially with the intent of connecting something with someone’s personal life to sink it deeper.
A single news article ever, or 1000 news articles that don’t impact “you specifically” are less effective than measured repetition across multiple fronts.
If rights can be capriciously and arbitrarily curtailed by armed agents of the state while effete judges yeet sternly-worded letters into the void, then those "rights" are worth about as much as the USA's signature on an international treaty. Which is to say, nothing.
I don't know if you've ever read any Bill/Declaration of Rights, but they all have "this right shall not be violated unless the law allows it" provisions. Many of them even have "oh, and requiring state licensing to exercise such right is not violating it" provisions (see e.g. "This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises" in Article 10 of ECHR).
The 4th, 5th, 7th do have such provisions. And despite the 1th amendment prohibiting the Congress from "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press", both war-time censorship and prohibition of pacifist/anti-war propaganda has been found to be constitutional during the WWI.
Then we can persecute the sinners that have premarital sex, eat pork, curse, work on Sundays, operate machinery on Saturdays or any sort of other backwards hick shit these idiots believe.
A human is born, lives a life, ingests the wrong chemical and becomes brain-dead. Now you have a human that is alive, but the person who was that human is permanently gone. To avoid murder, are we obliged to keep the body alive as long as possible by all available means? I don’t expect you would think so. I expect you’d agree terminating the life of the human body is the preferable and not a great ethical quandary.
I would agree that at conception we have a human life. But, not that we have a human person. There are no thoughts, emotions, memories, hopes, dreams. There is a very strong potential for a person. But, at conception what makes a person is not there yet.
At some point in time between the human existing a single living cell and the human voting in elections and joining the military, a person develops. But, it’s not a definite transition point in time. It’s a gradient.
Unfortunately, for practical reasons, the law must pick a definite point in time. The consensus seems to be “around the time that the fetus can be kept alive and continue developing independent from the mother using current technology.” A practical choice, for sure.
One might argue that the official transition point should be a bit earlier. But, that’s not the core of the disagreement.
The core seems to be that some living people do not appear to take into consideration the difference between being alive vs. being a person.
Except it is. In fact, the difference between alive and personhood and the point of transition are, fundamentally, the same issue: if the point of transition is considered the embryo, then the distinction doesn't really exist.
While there's legal consensus based on practicality, that doesn't mean people agree with it. Until a properly formal and objective ethical answer can be found, this disagreement will remain.
One could argue that a human body with a mostly-functional brain that will never again be conscious is human but not a person. And, simultaneously argue that a few million human stem cells, none of which are neurons yet, is a personified human. But, that would be a clearly inconsistent stance.
And, I’d argue that consensus literally means that a significant population agrees.
Formally and objectively it could be argued that even shortly post-birth, barely-conscious infants lack the required characteristics of an individual person. But, obviously it would require an unacceptable degree of callousness to terminate an infant. Certainly not a practice we agree should be encoded into law in this modern era.
In general, I find the pro-choice consensus to be reasonably conservative regarding the rights of an embryo vs. the rights of a fully-realized mid-life person. Strongly weighted towards the mother before 24 weeks and strongly weighted towards the embryo afterwards. But, if it comes down to the life of the fully-realized person vs. the life of the potential person, the choice goes to the mother. Or, if the potential is clearly a life of suffering and early death, the ethical choice is to reduce suffering via difficult actions.
Generally, I find that the pro-life arguments are largely based on a lack of consideration. I.e. “Life begins at the instant of insemination.” with literally zero further consideration. Or, on knowingly false propaganda: “Evil baby-killers are celebrating killing babies minutes before birth.”
To my knowledge, neither of those stances were in the mainstream before American politicians accepted that the Civil Rights Movement was not going away.
Before that, The Church saw its role in the abortion issue as charitably offering grief counseling to women who had experienced that difficult choice. After the political situation changed, the role of The Church changed to the demonization of unfortunate women for the purpose of manufacturing single-issue voters for the benefit of specific politicians.
Holding the "a permanently comatose human is not a person" and a "a fetus could be a person" aren't incompatible. The first statement presumes a definitive state to body where as the second statement holds a potential.
A significant portion of the population might agree, but it isn't all. If it isn't all, there's disagreement. It bears reminding, witch hunting was consensus at some point. I think this serves as a sufficient counterproof for majority consensus as a source of objective truth.
I'd like to press on this unnaceptable callousness: if it's objectively proven that newborns lack sufficient potential for personhood, why would there be an issue with post-birth abortion? It's not like the "conservative" approach here is victimless, the guardians of the newborn will have to bear a responsabily they have no duty to, infringing on their right to live. And infringing on this right is as unacceptable as it can get. Of course, this is presume an extreme pro-choice position is true, which I personally find unlikely.
In the end, I find that the majority of pro-choicers (not saying this includes you) aren't much better than religious pro-lifers. Most of the time, there isn't a deeper consideration beyond "my body, my rules" or "the law says humans with at least X age are people". Sometimes, it's even "evil misogynists want to enslave woman into baby factories." At least, the religious pro-lifers are transparent about being about their creed. These pro-choicers stiffle discussion under the pretense of legal consensus, which makes discussion harder.
But, because question of abortion, as you have stated before, is directly related to when personhood emerges, it's also related to the origin of personhood and, going further, human rights themselves. As such, I think there's less consensus on this topic, most just haven't given the proper consideration - we can kind of see it already: not every pro-lifer is against abortion in cases of rape/possibility of mother's death, and some pro-choicers are very strict: a fetus only becomes a person after being born.
Genuinely, if you want an actual answer: your choice of language basically made us seem like you weren't interested in a good faith, productive discussion with the possibility of minds being challenged/changed, so people just disabled and moved on.
"Last May, EFF reported that a sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion."
These people really have nothing better to do?
I've got distant family members in law enforcement. They brag about the reach of their equipment to surveil. Yes, they enjoy being overly suspicious.
Suspicious? The word is abusive. Of the law, of their uniform, of their fellow citizens.
>These people really have nothing better to do?
Making examples out of some number of unlucky peasants over otherwise trivial deviance that harms nearly nobody is one of the key jobs of men at arms.
Now, they may spend more time on "real crime" or collecting taxes by other names, but make no mistake this sort of stuff is stuff they (as an agency) must do if they are to properly serve the interests of their master.
They literally think they are doing the work of some divine creator. They have plenty of time to ruin the lives of other people because they think it saves their own.
Really insightful comment. Couldn't agree more.
And many of these people really do need their Good Works on the force to do the saving, because God knows what they do to their wives and kids back home.
They also believe in eternal torture as punishment. If someone doesn't accept their god, their god will send that person's soul to hell to be tortured forever. Therefore, essentially anything can be justified to force people to accept their god, since no finite amount of harm can exceed the infinite torture of hell.
People who believe that sort of thing are, IMO, extremely evil, and worshiping an evil deity.
> from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader
This feels purposefully misleading. Did they manually watch hours and hours of footage, or is this the equivalent of "I searched an online corpus of hundreds of millions of documents" (I Googled it)
Doesn't feel misleading at all, "searched data from" is pretty much your "I Googled it" without branding.
The inclusion of 83,000 seems more intended to quantify the scope of the surveillance accessible to these sheriffs.
Sure, call it that. They Googled it on their comperensive, nation-wide, unlimited access, fully indexed and integrated surveillance network (with 83,000 edge nodes)
[flagged]
As someone that does, I disagree. Laws on this subject should exclusively apply to providers, with exceptions for medical necessity. There are too many harms that come from targeting individuals to be worthwhile.
Problem with that is that gathering evidence invariably leads to tracking down the recipient of the provider's service.
Not all problems can or should be solved.
Some would argue there are too many harms that occur if antiabortion measures aren't taken :(
Either argue the point or stop talking. This is a very hard position to take seriously, twee frowny face and all, if you’re willing to sell down the river the privacy of a largely vulnerable population because some sanctimonious humanism. :(
I am not an antiabortion crusader. I'm offering what I understand to be the antiabortion position here. By ":(" I wanted to imply "Unfortunately there are seemingly lots of people who seem to hold this view genuinely and very strongly", which was not my greatest moment of clear communication.
Indeed. If bringing justice to the guilty requires punishing the innocent, what's even the point?
this case was a self administrated abortion?
The trail of injustice required to bring justice to such a case does not result in a balanced scale.
It is more like, to men who enjoy destroying women and weaker people, this feels good.
It is about them feeling good.
The only reasons to entertain that perspective is their personal delusions which they ought not impose on others also when an act takes place in one jurisdiction wherein all actors are within that jurisdiction it is obviously nonsense to apply a different justifications laws to the act based on their residence.
There is no rest for the wicked.
They have a law to enforce. The law enforcement activity is as good as the law :(
Every minute spent tracking down a lady getting an abortion is a minute not spent tracking down a murderer or a rapist or similar.
> getting an abortion is a minute not spent tracking down a murderer
but see, there are people who believe abortion is murder, and perhaps one of the worst forms of murder because of its victim’s extreme innocence since it has not caused any harm in this world.
[flagged]
> I would accept that such people are entitled to their beliefs only if they would equally believe in the extreme innocence of a chicken who has not caused any harm in this world and they would seek to punish the murderer of the chicken.
Why is equating human and chicken life necessary for you to accept that people are entitled to their beliefs?
> A finger is not able to live independently, but the same is true for an embryo.
The finger is the person's DNA. The child is not their DNA.
In a 2025 University of Iowa single-center study (published in JAMA Network Open), out of 22 infants born alive at 21 weeks gestation, resuscitation was attempted in 17. 6 survived to NICU discharge (about 35%), and 1 remained hospitalized.
Weird-ass pagan child worship located nowhere in the Bible. The strange idea that people are born clean and deserving, and that life makes them filthy and worthy of death. A really hateful, sadistic ideology. Christians did not care about abortion until the late 18th century, it's not even an old belief.
You can have a nearly identical baby in less than a year. A 50-year old takes 51 years to make.
That being said, the weird secular idea that babies are meaningless lumps of protein until they are born and are suddenly ensouled is equally silly. They're just arguing about dates, and at least the Christian tradition actually believes in a soul. I don't think most secular people could explain why you shouldn't kill an infant other than they find it distasteful, like eating a dog (when you eat pig and cow.)
That abortion is more distasteful than murder is a modern political culture-war position, though, that nobody would have considered until at least the early-mid 20th century. In fact, the idea that babies were sinless meant that they would go to Heaven, so 19th century Christians greatly preferred to murder a baby, turn themselves in and be executed for the crime rather than commit suicide (which was an express ticket to Hell.) Both the baby and the believer could then go to Heaven.
(amazing username.)
You assume that a lady getting an abortion is not committing murder--these folks clearly think she is.
(We don't need to argue about whether it is in fact murder, or whether if it is that the murder is justified or not--just understand that there are people that believe differently, and apparently they're willing to expend police resources on it.)
> We don't need to argue about whether it is in fact murder
That's exactly the problem: we do. Not here, specifically, but if someone's false beliefs have grown to the point that they are hurting others over them, they need to be stopped.
Do you not realize that this argument applies equally well both against pro-choice and against pro-lifers? It does, therefore it is entirely invalid and irrelevant.
Yes, those people with "false beliefs". Ah, if only we could force everyone to have true beliefs. And it's not against freedom of thought and consciousness, oh no! We're only against actually false beliefs. That, you know, have been proven wrong. Or at least for which the proofs of incorrectness exist that we believe are correct. But since our beliefs true, this is fine.
He said nothing about forcing. Suppose the false belief he was talking about was Creationism. Does his comment read as authoritarian?
Yes, it does.
It's fascinating that you are attempting to portray a comment as authoritarian that is arguing people should not enforce their false beliefs on others and should not restrict their bodily autonomy. It's literally an argument against being authoritarian.
What I understood their point to be is that the only reason they are "false beliefs" is your own biases. If they aren't actual "false beliefs", then the restrictions on bodily autonomy are as justified as when dealing with killings, and your argument degenerates into pro-authoritarism.
Some things are categorically false, and those conclusions can be reached rationally. That seemed to be his only point, and he did not say anything about preventing anyone (like Carroll's Queen of Hearts) from believing six impossible things before breakfast. That would be authoritarian.
In a democracy like ours, stopping the Queen and others from enacting restrictive and harmful policy based on impossibilities only requires convincing arguments. People are still perfectly free to believe in Creationism, but convincing arguments have removed it from curricula.
> stopping the Queen and others from enacting restrictive and harmful policy
Like regulating the production, sales, and use of opiates. Or tightly restricting the abortions. Or forcing people to wear seatbelts while driving (and two years ago on this very HN I've seen lots of people complaining about state-mandated vehicular safety, so no, the seatbelts are not an uncontroversial topic). There are many other examples of the authoritarian nanny states unduly restricting bodily autonomy of people.
Crucially, most of those policies aren't really based on truth or falsity of anything but simply on a value call. Forcing people to wear seatbelts may or may not actually reduce vehicular injuries (in fact, some research indicates that wearing seatbelts makes one more prone to reckless driving) — they're mandated anyhow, simply because some people believe it's the right thing to do.
As I said, the law is the problem. Since the law demands to track and investigate ladies suspected of destruction of embryos inside their own bodies, the police's direct job is to do just that, even to the detriment of other activities.
The police themselves may consider it stupid and counterproductive, but their opinion does not count until the next elections.
The universality of "I want the rule of law!.. unless I dislike the laws, of course" stance is truly depressing. I swear, were it not for rather strict ground-level prohibitions in the constitutions, we'd all went back to allegedly enlightened monarchies ages ago. Perhaps we yet all will, things really are looking quite peculiar around the world right now.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
Wait you think there are so many exceptions for rape and incest because of the political power of the rape and incest lobby?
Holy fuck. Even for someone who has quickly earned a name for himself and his insane takes, this is a strong entry.
Bravo, ButlerianJihad!
Think of it this way:
Incest is not always consensual, and incest may be intra-family molestation or sexual abuse. In those cases, certainly the "rape exceptions" cover mothers who seek to abort their unborn children.
However, incest is not always non-consensual, such as between ordinary adults who just cross a "bright line boundary" and have a sexual affair that they may or may not regret. So is this why there are so many exceptions for "non-rape incest" abortions? Why, to avoid being exposed to shame or having, for example, siblings need to co-parent their rather illicit offspring that nobody will talk about? What's unique about "non-rape incest" that it requires its own carved-out exception that is so often baked into all the laws prohibiting other kinds of abortions?
You are incorrect. The logic behind a separate incest exception is that the vast majority of incest is at least coercive/groomed if not forcible rape, but qualifying for the rape exception would require meeting the significant and probably-not-achievable standard of proving rape months after it happened. And in many incest cases that means specifically "proving rape" after years and years "intimate relations," given again that most incest cases are coerced/groomed for years or decades.
Contrast with the simple prenatal paternity test.
within the US context, the government isnt allowed to just have any law it wants, and it isnt allowed yo enforce laws that breach individual rights
"I was just enforcing the law" is no better than "I was just following orders".
[flagged]
[flagged]
You’re putting words into that hypothetical person’s mouth.
I'm upset every day I'm alive chief not everyone wants to be here
How does prosecuting someone for getting an abortion lead to that result?
Who’s that?
Seems like sheriff was searching for missing person. Was concern about her welfare and mental health, thus the use of the cameras. You can buy Mifepristone at CVS, Target, Walgreen's and the like. I don't think they were trying to track which CVS she was going to.
The article is misleading, but that should never get in the way of righteous rage that helps a person form identity and purpose in an otherwise existential and empty vacuum of meaning.
The above article is https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/07/we-want-texans-know-th... .
That article links to https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te... which links to https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...
The second article states what you are saying, but the third article says that the information given in the second article was a lie.
They lie to you constantly and they know it. You are being rage-baited to farm you votes, clicks, views, and likes:
According to internal Johnson County Sheriff's Office files released under the Texas Public Information Act, the entire "self-administered abortion" narrative was fabricated by a violent felon:
https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/crime/article31451... https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/feb/04/eastern-wa-flo...
The Ex-Girlfriend's Account: The woman later informed investigators that she had actually suffered a natural miscarriage after her ex-boyfriend physically assaulted her.
The False Fetus Evidence: The ex-boyfriend—seeking to deflect blame for the assault—collected a blood clot from the miscarriage, presented it to the police, and lied by claiming his ex-girlfriend had intentionally taken illegal abortion pills to end a pregnancy.
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dallas-police-cameras-us...
The Intent of the Search: The police reports later clarified that while the deputy typed "had an abortion" into the Flock Safety tracking system, they were actually attempting to locate the woman and her children because she was fleeing from this domestic violence situation.
Because the initial report was based on a malicious and fabricated claim by an abuser, an official clinical timeline of the pregnancy was never established or verified in the official "death investigation" file.
We had a lady down here in Estonia working for police. She used their extensive databases for non-work related reasons and got, very publicly, fired. She decided to appeal and lost. Through all levels of court up to the EU one. So for years, there would be a newspaper headline “remember that person who invaded your privacy? Still guilty”. Could not wish for a more impactful public execution.
It's no longer safe to even use a period tracking app in many US states now. The women I know are all cautioning each other to go back to pen and paper, and ditch anything app based.
Apple offers this in Health and it stays on device or encrypted in backups. I’m not sure why anyone would want this in the cloud.
Correct and you shouldn't use any health apps that don't take your privacy seriously.
Here are privacy respecting ones: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/health-and-wellness/#menstr...
Most of us here knows ways around this, but many people are not educated.
One method is get off your smart phone and boot tails and do the searches there. Maybe that is something EFF can make known. Like list trusted onion sites that have information where women can go and get help.
You boot tails to track your period?
[dead]
One reason the government surveillance is important is I've read there is a growing movement among the right-to-lifers to hold women who abort criminally liable.
wild that it took abortion for people to notice. the same cameras have been feeding ICE lookups across 5,000+ towns, quietly, for the last couple years
Education is often best achieved through spaced repetition and cross-discipline integration, especially with the intent of connecting something with someone’s personal life to sink it deeper.
A single news article ever, or 1000 news articles that don’t impact “you specifically” are less effective than measured repetition across multiple fronts.
[dead]
If rights can be capriciously and arbitrarily curtailed by armed agents of the state while effete judges yeet sternly-worded letters into the void, then those "rights" are worth about as much as the USA's signature on an international treaty. Which is to say, nothing.
I don't know if you've ever read any Bill/Declaration of Rights, but they all have "this right shall not be violated unless the law allows it" provisions. Many of them even have "oh, and requiring state licensing to exercise such right is not violating it" provisions (see e.g. "This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises" in Article 10 of ECHR).
Nonsense. No such provision appears anywhere in the US Bill of Rights.
The 4th, 5th, 7th do have such provisions. And despite the 1th amendment prohibiting the Congress from "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press", both war-time censorship and prohibition of pacifist/anti-war propaganda has been found to be constitutional during the WWI.
> …while effete judges yeet sternly-worded letters into the void…
You, sir, have a way with words.
In going to choose to take this as a compliment :)
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
lol got em boss
Then we can persecute the sinners that have premarital sex, eat pork, curse, work on Sundays, operate machinery on Saturdays or any sort of other backwards hick shit these idiots believe.
Why'd we not just let the Confederacy go?
[flagged]
A human is born, lives a life, ingests the wrong chemical and becomes brain-dead. Now you have a human that is alive, but the person who was that human is permanently gone. To avoid murder, are we obliged to keep the body alive as long as possible by all available means? I don’t expect you would think so. I expect you’d agree terminating the life of the human body is the preferable and not a great ethical quandary.
I would agree that at conception we have a human life. But, not that we have a human person. There are no thoughts, emotions, memories, hopes, dreams. There is a very strong potential for a person. But, at conception what makes a person is not there yet.
At some point in time between the human existing a single living cell and the human voting in elections and joining the military, a person develops. But, it’s not a definite transition point in time. It’s a gradient.
Unfortunately, for practical reasons, the law must pick a definite point in time. The consensus seems to be “around the time that the fetus can be kept alive and continue developing independent from the mother using current technology.” A practical choice, for sure.
One might argue that the official transition point should be a bit earlier. But, that’s not the core of the disagreement.
The core seems to be that some living people do not appear to take into consideration the difference between being alive vs. being a person.
Except it is. In fact, the difference between alive and personhood and the point of transition are, fundamentally, the same issue: if the point of transition is considered the embryo, then the distinction doesn't really exist.
While there's legal consensus based on practicality, that doesn't mean people agree with it. Until a properly formal and objective ethical answer can be found, this disagreement will remain.
I must disagree.
One could argue that a human body with a mostly-functional brain that will never again be conscious is human but not a person. And, simultaneously argue that a few million human stem cells, none of which are neurons yet, is a personified human. But, that would be a clearly inconsistent stance.
And, I’d argue that consensus literally means that a significant population agrees.
Formally and objectively it could be argued that even shortly post-birth, barely-conscious infants lack the required characteristics of an individual person. But, obviously it would require an unacceptable degree of callousness to terminate an infant. Certainly not a practice we agree should be encoded into law in this modern era.
In general, I find the pro-choice consensus to be reasonably conservative regarding the rights of an embryo vs. the rights of a fully-realized mid-life person. Strongly weighted towards the mother before 24 weeks and strongly weighted towards the embryo afterwards. But, if it comes down to the life of the fully-realized person vs. the life of the potential person, the choice goes to the mother. Or, if the potential is clearly a life of suffering and early death, the ethical choice is to reduce suffering via difficult actions.
Generally, I find that the pro-life arguments are largely based on a lack of consideration. I.e. “Life begins at the instant of insemination.” with literally zero further consideration. Or, on knowingly false propaganda: “Evil baby-killers are celebrating killing babies minutes before birth.”
To my knowledge, neither of those stances were in the mainstream before American politicians accepted that the Civil Rights Movement was not going away.
Before that, The Church saw its role in the abortion issue as charitably offering grief counseling to women who had experienced that difficult choice. After the political situation changed, the role of The Church changed to the demonization of unfortunate women for the purpose of manufacturing single-issue voters for the benefit of specific politicians.
I also must disagree.
Holding the "a permanently comatose human is not a person" and a "a fetus could be a person" aren't incompatible. The first statement presumes a definitive state to body where as the second statement holds a potential.
A significant portion of the population might agree, but it isn't all. If it isn't all, there's disagreement. It bears reminding, witch hunting was consensus at some point. I think this serves as a sufficient counterproof for majority consensus as a source of objective truth.
I'd like to press on this unnaceptable callousness: if it's objectively proven that newborns lack sufficient potential for personhood, why would there be an issue with post-birth abortion? It's not like the "conservative" approach here is victimless, the guardians of the newborn will have to bear a responsabily they have no duty to, infringing on their right to live. And infringing on this right is as unacceptable as it can get. Of course, this is presume an extreme pro-choice position is true, which I personally find unlikely.
In the end, I find that the majority of pro-choicers (not saying this includes you) aren't much better than religious pro-lifers. Most of the time, there isn't a deeper consideration beyond "my body, my rules" or "the law says humans with at least X age are people". Sometimes, it's even "evil misogynists want to enslave woman into baby factories." At least, the religious pro-lifers are transparent about being about their creed. These pro-choicers stiffle discussion under the pretense of legal consensus, which makes discussion harder.
But, because question of abortion, as you have stated before, is directly related to when personhood emerges, it's also related to the origin of personhood and, going further, human rights themselves. As such, I think there's less consensus on this topic, most just haven't given the proper consideration - we can kind of see it already: not every pro-lifer is against abortion in cases of rape/possibility of mother's death, and some pro-choicers are very strict: a fetus only becomes a person after being born.
Good points all around.
Hey! Thanks for the fun, good-faith argument! Such a rarity these days that most folks seem unaware are that arguments even can be collaborative.
You cum into a paper towel again and throw it away - is that murder?
I agree at some point it's a "person" but it's a long way off from insemination.
Generally brain waves start showing up around mid-to-late second trimester so I think one could reasonably argue somewhere in there.
Given what OP said, probably not:
> There is no clear discrete point, other than insemination where it is not murder vs murder.
Will you actually address this point?
[flagged]
[flagged]
Why the minuses? Where am I wrong?
Genuinely, if you want an actual answer: your choice of language basically made us seem like you weren't interested in a good faith, productive discussion with the possibility of minds being challenged/changed, so people just disabled and moved on.
Complaining about downvotes gets you downvoted, for one.
Well, it's a very lazy way of disagreeing.
It is possible to put forth an idea that is both highly disagreeable and unworthy of a response.
[dead]
[dead]
>We want Texans to know their rights
Unless they are on X.