4 ms·

Patrilocality and son preference have nothing to do with abuse of women. Patrilocality is largely pragmatic and son preference is a symptom of population contro

Patrilocality and son preference have nothing to do with abuse of women. Patrilocality is largely pragmatic and son preference is a symptom of population control unless the author is brave enough to claim that abortion specifically against girls is bad (I doubt that lol)

ajuc 5y ago
> brave enough to claim that abortion specifically against girls is bad why would it be brave? Firing people is ok. Firing people for being of particular gender is bad.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2012/05/problem-and-solution-mismatch-son-preference-and-sex-selective-abortion-bans https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2012/05/problem-and-solution-... Not sure what anyone getting fired has to do with anything. Son preference refers to sex selection, not employment termination based on gender.
- bsza 5y ago
  The main argument behind pro-choice is that a fetus isn't a person. Otherwise abortion would mean killing people. If you really believe your analogy of firing people is a good one, then you have already recognized the aborted fetus as a person.
  - alasdair_ 5y ago
    The main argument behind pro-choice is that women own their own bodies, not society at large.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      It's a large enough issue that you can't really sum up “the main argument” in a pithy Hacker News comment; most anyone with a reasoned opinion has thought about it enough to fill several essays, and to get the “main argument” requires considering a lot of people's reasoning.
      - nautilius 5y ago
        You really can, though. This discussion is considered “solved” in most of the so-called civilized world. Your argument could be equally applied to other topics that were once debated hotly but now are mostly considered “solved”, such as “is it good to have slaves”, or “should women be allowed to vote”.
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        “Solved” ≠ “simple”. There's a consensus on the right answer, but that doesn't make the reasoning trivial. • “Is it good to have slaves”: they're people, so they shouldn't be enslaved. (Almost axiomic, with the same reasoning in consequentialist, deontological and virtue ethical systems.) • “Should women be allowed to vote?”: they're people who are affected by policy, so yes, they should be able to decide it. (See: the whole justification for democracy in the first place; it just falls out. … Should children be allowed to vote?) I don't think you can come up with something so simple for abortion, unless it's one of the axioms of your ethical system. That's more a function of our (relative) lack of understanding, rather than the problem being intrinsically complex… probably.
        nautilius 5y ago
        Oh, it obviously isn't simple, otherwise it wouldn't have taken so long to abolish slavery and let women vote, I couldn't agree more. But imagine stepping out from your time machine to 1860 Richmond, VA, I don't think many people would agree with your first point, that now seems so obvious. It's a sign of the immense cultural progress we made that you can now state your two points as truisms. Let's not forget that there was a whole war fought about whether your point one holds value or not - more than 600,000 people were killed trying to find an answer to this question (almost as many as died due to COVID in this country so far). Our cultural values will continue to evolve, things that are heavily debated today will seem as plain as the two points you raise are for us today.
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        > Oh, it obviously isn't simple, otherwise it wouldn't have taken so long to abolish slavery and let women vote, I couldn't agree more. Slavery didn't carry on so long because people “weren't sure whether it was okay”. It carried on because the powerful wanted slaves. The history of slavery discourse is the history of people inventing new reasons that it's actually a good thing – but the reasons it's a bad thing stay the same, and were even known and remarked upon in Ancient Greece. Women had the vote in 1264, when the House of Commons was first formed in England, and they had the vote in 1295 when the then-King officially declared the House of Commons part of parliament. In fact, England had universal suffrage (albeit hampered by the lack of secret ballot) until 1430, when it was restricted to forty-shilling freeholders. Are you really saying these are hard problems? These are problems that were introduced as a means of enabling the concentration of power. The ethics of abortion is a problem introduced by our biology; why would you even expect it to be so easy?
    - bsza 5y ago
      Precisely. Therefore, society at large should have no business in the reason a woman wants to remove part of her body. By this logic, why should wanting to remove a fetus with a specific genital be considered any more sexist than wanting to undergo a gender change operation? In both cases, you don't like the reproductive organ in your body and want to get rid of it.
      - antattack 5y ago
        Woman cannot tell the gender without a help of technology. Technology can amplify good or bad results of person's actions . Therefore I would argue it requires debate and establishment of norms that are outside of natural laws.
      - alasdair_ 5y ago
        Society is allowed to have an opinion. It’s when that opinion turns into law that it becomes a problem. Personally I think women who smoke while pregnant are horrible, and I don’t mind saying something to them about it. I don’t think my opinion should have the force of law however.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
lovich 5y ago
I will be brave enough to claim that abortion specifically against girls is bad. I’d be brave enough to say that abortion specifically against boys is bad too. I am confused as to why you think this requires much bravery though. It doesn’t feel like a particularly hidden belief that I’m letting out
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Because once you start claiming that certain subsets of abortions are bad, you start to open up inconvenient conversations that erode Roe v Wade and then it would be an actual debate instead of a foregone conclusion for the left. I’m not trying to incite anything here though. I’m quite certain that the author genuinely made a mistake including it in their list.
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    The wording "abortion specifically against women is bad" is ambiguous. It could be taken to mean either, "aborting girls is bad, and aborting boys is not bad," or, "selectively aborting girls but not boys is bad." The discussion thus far is consistent with the possibility that each participant has taken the phrase to mean something different.
  - lovich 5y ago
    I don’t think this erodes roe v wade. I don’t think “choosing to abort your pregnancy specifically because it was a girl is bad” rises beyond social condemnation and needs to be legislated. There seems to be some sort of unspoken belief among anti abortion proponents that roe v wade and pro choice beliefs are built on the flimsiest of legal arguments and if we even squint at it wrong the whole thing will come tumbling down. > I’m not trying to incite anything here though. >… then it would be an actual debate instead of a foregone conclusion for the left. I find it hard to rectify those two statements in the same discussion much less the same comment Edit: added the word “specifically” to the second sentence
    - jimbob45 5y ago
kadoban 5y ago
It's _at least_ not a good sign for a society's treatment of women if parents preferentially don't even want one.
simonh 5y ago
> Patrilocality and son preference have nothing to do with abuse of women. Women that move to live in the husbands extended family have no existing relationships, no blood relations around them. They are outsiders and so are very vulnerable. Son preference indicates that females are not valued, which as the article points out is correlated with poor treatment of women. Of course aborting pregnancies of females is bad, it’s utterly stunning that you can think joking about it is ok. As the article points out an imbalance in the population means there won’t be enough girls to go around. This correlates with high rates of violence and crime due to all those frustrated men.

ajuc 5y ago

> brave enough to claim that abortion specifically against girls is bad why would it be brave? Firing people is ok. Firing people for being of particular gender is bad.

jimbob45 5y ago
https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2012/05/problem-and-solution-mismatch-son-preference-and-sex-selective-abortion-bans https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2012/05/problem-and-solution-... Not sure what anyone getting fired has to do with anything. Son preference refers to sex selection, not employment termination based on gender.
bsza 5y ago
The main argument behind pro-choice is that a fetus isn't a person. Otherwise abortion would mean killing people. If you really believe your analogy of firing people is a good one, then you have already recognized the aborted fetus as a person.
- alasdair_ 5y ago
  The main argument behind pro-choice is that women own their own bodies, not society at large.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    It's a large enough issue that you can't really sum up “the main argument” in a pithy Hacker News comment; most anyone with a reasoned opinion has thought about it enough to fill several essays, and to get the “main argument” requires considering a lot of people's reasoning.
    - nautilius 5y ago
      You really can, though. This discussion is considered “solved” in most of the so-called civilized world. Your argument could be equally applied to other topics that were once debated hotly but now are mostly considered “solved”, such as “is it good to have slaves”, or “should women be allowed to vote”.
      - wizzwizz4 5y ago
        “Solved” ≠ “simple”. There's a consensus on the right answer, but that doesn't make the reasoning trivial. • “Is it good to have slaves”: they're people, so they shouldn't be enslaved. (Almost axiomic, with the same reasoning in consequentialist, deontological and virtue ethical systems.) • “Should women be allowed to vote?”: they're people who are affected by policy, so yes, they should be able to decide it. (See: the whole justification for democracy in the first place; it just falls out. … Should children be allowed to vote?) I don't think you can come up with something so simple for abortion, unless it's one of the axioms of your ethical system. That's more a function of our (relative) lack of understanding, rather than the problem being intrinsically complex… probably.
        nautilius 5y ago
        Oh, it obviously isn't simple, otherwise it wouldn't have taken so long to abolish slavery and let women vote, I couldn't agree more. But imagine stepping out from your time machine to 1860 Richmond, VA, I don't think many people would agree with your first point, that now seems so obvious. It's a sign of the immense cultural progress we made that you can now state your two points as truisms. Let's not forget that there was a whole war fought about whether your point one holds value or not - more than 600,000 people were killed trying to find an answer to this question (almost as many as died due to COVID in this country so far). Our cultural values will continue to evolve, things that are heavily debated today will seem as plain as the two points you raise are for us today.
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        > Oh, it obviously isn't simple, otherwise it wouldn't have taken so long to abolish slavery and let women vote, I couldn't agree more. Slavery didn't carry on so long because people “weren't sure whether it was okay”. It carried on because the powerful wanted slaves. The history of slavery discourse is the history of people inventing new reasons that it's actually a good thing – but the reasons it's a bad thing stay the same, and were even known and remarked upon in Ancient Greece. Women had the vote in 1264, when the House of Commons was first formed in England, and they had the vote in 1295 when the then-King officially declared the House of Commons part of parliament. In fact, England had universal suffrage (albeit hampered by the lack of secret ballot) until 1430, when it was restricted to forty-shilling freeholders. Are you really saying these are hard problems? These are problems that were introduced as a means of enabling the concentration of power. The ethics of abortion is a problem introduced by our biology; why would you even expect it to be so easy?
  - bsza 5y ago
    Precisely. Therefore, society at large should have no business in the reason a woman wants to remove part of her body. By this logic, why should wanting to remove a fetus with a specific genital be considered any more sexist than wanting to undergo a gender change operation? In both cases, you don't like the reproductive organ in your body and want to get rid of it.
    - antattack 5y ago
      Woman cannot tell the gender without a help of technology. Technology can amplify good or bad results of person's actions . Therefore I would argue it requires debate and establishment of norms that are outside of natural laws.
    - alasdair_ 5y ago
      Society is allowed to have an opinion. It’s when that opinion turns into law that it becomes a problem. Personally I think women who smoke while pregnant are horrible, and I don’t mind saying something to them about it. I don’t think my opinion should have the force of law however.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

lovich 5y ago

I will be brave enough to claim that abortion specifically against girls is bad. I’d be brave enough to say that abortion specifically against boys is bad too. I am confused as to why you think this requires much bravery though. It doesn’t feel like a particularly hidden belief that I’m letting out

jimbob45 5y ago
Because once you start claiming that certain subsets of abortions are bad, you start to open up inconvenient conversations that erode Roe v Wade and then it would be an actual debate instead of a foregone conclusion for the left. I’m not trying to incite anything here though. I’m quite certain that the author genuinely made a mistake including it in their list.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  The wording "abortion specifically against women is bad" is ambiguous. It could be taken to mean either, "aborting girls is bad, and aborting boys is not bad," or, "selectively aborting girls but not boys is bad." The discussion thus far is consistent with the possibility that each participant has taken the phrase to mean something different.
- lovich 5y ago
  I don’t think this erodes roe v wade. I don’t think “choosing to abort your pregnancy specifically because it was a girl is bad” rises beyond social condemnation and needs to be legislated. There seems to be some sort of unspoken belief among anti abortion proponents that roe v wade and pro choice beliefs are built on the flimsiest of legal arguments and if we even squint at it wrong the whole thing will come tumbling down. > I’m not trying to incite anything here though. >… then it would be an actual debate instead of a foregone conclusion for the left. I find it hard to rectify those two statements in the same discussion much less the same comment Edit: added the word “specifically” to the second sentence
  - jimbob45 5y ago

kadoban 5y ago

It's _at least_ not a good sign for a society's treatment of women if parents preferentially don't even want one.

simonh 5y ago

> Patrilocality and son preference have nothing to do with abuse of women. Women that move to live in the husbands extended family have no existing relationships, no blood relations around them. They are outsiders and so are very vulnerable. Son preference indicates that females are not valued, which as the article points out is correlated with poor treatment of women. Of course aborting pregnancies of females is bad, it’s utterly stunning that you can think joking about it is ok. As the article points out an imbalance in the population means there won’t be enough girls to go around. This correlates with high rates of violence and crime due to all those frustrated men.